by Judy Alter
I fled from the room to fling myself on my bed and melodramatically sob out my fears and anger. I'd never have admitted that I was as afraid as I was angry—but St. Louis was another world, miles away and different from the only place I'd ever known. The very word city had a certain terror about it, and I took no comfort from Mama's rose-colored recollections of the place.
Mama let me cry a good long time, and then she came to sit on the edge of the bed. "It won't be so bad," she said softly, smoothing my hair with one hand. "You'll learn manners and to sew fine stitches and—maybe a little French."
"You taught me all those things, 'cept the French," I said, my voice still quaverong with tears, "and I don't need to know French. There's no one out here to talk it to, and we aren't likely to go to France anytime." I knew where France was because of Mama's insistence on geography, but nothing in my wildest imagination would ever suggest to me that I'd go to France. Shows how wrong you can be.
"I'll miss you," she went on, as though I hadn't spoken, "almost as much as your papa will—that's hard for you to believe, but it's true. I'm not sending you to the convent for punishment, Thomasina, and it's important that you understand that. I'm sending you, even though I'd rather have you here, because I love you."
It took me years to understand that and to figure out how lonely she was out there in that house, married to a man who intrigued her but with whom she had nothing in common and little to talk about. Her alternative was a tomboy daughter—better than no company—and yet with the best of intentions, she sent that daughter away.
* * *
Papa was to deliver me to the convent, though he wasn't any happier about it than I was. He stood by impassively as Mama hugged me.
"I'll miss you," she said, when she could have said a lot of things like "This is for your own good" and "Someday you'll thank me," but bless Mama, she didn't. She'd said it once, and she never repeated it her whole long life. That day she simply hugged me tight and then stepped back, but not quick enough to hide the tears in her eyes.
I'll come back ladylike, Mama, I vowed silently.
For a long time, I didn't understand why Mama didn't take me to St. Louis or even come with us. She was the one who loved the city, knew the convent, who aspired for her daughter. This was, as it were, her project—and yet she made it Papa's responsibility to take me to St. Louis and deposit me at the convent while she stayed behind, alone, at the ranch.
Papa rode silently in the wagon for a long time, his eyes fixed straight ahead, never glancing at me. Finally, as though Mama had just spoken, he said, "I 'spect I'll miss you more than your mama, Tommy Jo. But I—well, I had to go along with your mama on this."
Why? I wanted to ask. Why couldn't you tell her that I could be ladylike at home, without ever going to the convent?
As if he'd read my mind, Papa said, "I tried for several years now to tell myself that you were growing up a lady, in spite of all the time you spent with me. That your mama's influence would win out—but I see that I was wrong. And I guess if I had to choose between having you a lady and having you a cowhand, I'd have to put ladylike first." It was an unusual speech for Papa.
"Mama says I'll be a better cowhand if I'm a lady," I said. "No, what she really said was that I'd get along better with the cowhands if I didn't try to be one of them." I thought about that a minute. "But Papa, I never cuss like they do, or sit around when they talk. I don't try to be one of them."
"There's more to it than that," Papa said, almost chuckling. "And I guess it's the convent's duty to teach you the difference."
We talked no more about it.
Now I have only vague memories of our arrival by wagon in Oklahoma City and the train ride from there to St. Louis. In St. Louis, Papa borrowed a carriage from a friend of Mr. Luckett, and we arrived at the convent in fine style but both as glum as calves on the end of a rope.
"This is it?" I asked, looking at a red brick building, three stories high, with a wrought-iron fence around it. Except that it was bigger than most, it could have passed for just another house in a neighborhood of fine homes. To me, they all looked like fortresses, for my idea of a house was long, low, and made of wood. There were bay windows at the corners of the second and third floors, fireplace chimneys—more than one—sprouting from the roof, and neatly trimmed hedges along the front of the building.
"This is it," Papa said.
Papa left me, and I had no way of knowing, for years, that it would be a full long week before he left St. Louis for the territory. But Mama knew—and that was why she hadn't come with us.
* * *
The convent taught me what Papa wanted me to learn—a sense of self-possession, if you will, and a certain kind of pride in myself. But not, I think, in the way that Papa meant.
"Thomasina," Mama had said tactfully before I left, "you might try not to talk about horses and cattle all the time. The girls at the convent—they won't understand."
"They're city girls?" I suggested.
"Yes, and they probably think the Indian Territory is the Wild West."
Mama's warning was prophetic. The girls treated me as a curiosity and an outcast. They called me Cowgirl.
"If men who work with cattle are cowboys," sang Abigail with the blond curls, "then you must be a cowgirl, because you work with cattle. Ugh! I think it's disgusting."
"It is not disgusting," I flared, never one to keep quiet. "It's good honest work, and it keeps you outdoors—and," I added boastfully, "I'm good at it."
"I'm sure I wouldn't want to be good at it," laughed Marcelline, daughter of a rich St. Louis banker. "I'd rather be good at the things ladies are supposed to do."
"Like what?" I challenged.
"Oh, cooking and sewing and keeping house," Marcelline said airily.
"I can do those things, too," I retorted. "I can cook and play the piano—and I know where France is."
This earned me howls of laughter that I didn't understand. But I did understand that arguing with them was a losing battle. Cowgirl I was, for the whole long year that I was at the school.
"Cowgirl, show us how you throw a rope!"
"Cowgirl, do the buffalo roam near your home?"
"Cowgirl, can you outride an Indian?"
If they'd known the truth about the Cherokee Strip, with its history of Indians, outlaws, and trail drives, they'd probably have been even more horrified. But none of them would have listened had I tried to tell them..
If they felt superior to me, perhaps I encouraged them, for I envied Abigail and Marcelline and the others who came from big homes in St. Louis and elsewhere—one girl was from Texas!—and whose fathers were bankers, lawyers, and merchants, while their mothers kept house and gave teas and lived the life that Mama always wanted. Sometimes jealousy ate away at me, and I had to hide tears of anger from the girls, who would have used those tears as another occasion to jibe at me.
Sister Maria Theresa, a diminutive nun who'd probably never seen a horse, saved the year, and me. "To ride a horse," she said, "is a fine skill. Not everyone can do it. If you are good at it, you should be very proud."
"I am good at it, Sister," I said.
"There is," she went on, "a fine line between justifiable pride in our accomplishments and appropriate humility. I hope that you will remember that always."
"Yes, Sister."
The more Sister Maria Theresa talked to me, the more determined I became to learn everything I could during that year—Papa had promised I had to stay no more than one school year—and then get back to what I loved doing. I began to take pride in what I learned at the school, from reading Shakespeare to speaking French—well, with an awkward accent, but I could read it. And I also began to stand tall when the girls teased me and called me Cowgirl. There wasn't, I decided, a name I'd like better.
The religious part of our instruction baffled me and left me feeling awkward. Mama had taught me prayers—"The Lord's Prayer" and "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep"—but I'd never been to church. The r
ich pageantry of the Catholic service was a sudden shock to the sensibilities of a prairie girl, and no instruction was offered beforehand. The nuns assumed that everyone knew what to do. I found myself watching the girl in front of me carefully, kneeling when she did, bowing my head at her signal, wishing I could repeat the words that meant nothing to me.
"You did not," I wrote accusingly to Mama, "tell me about church. I feel like a fool."
Sister Maria Theresa rescued me again. "You are not comfortable in chapel, are you, child?"
"No, Sister, I never know what's going on. We had no church at home."
"And there's no guarantee you would have gone to the Catholic church if there were one," she said. "I believe your parents are"—she ruffled papers on her desk—" well, your mother lists herself as Methodist and your father put nothing." She could have said something about Papa finding religion in the sky and the prairie and the great outdoors—Papa himself would have made that trite claim—but she simply said, "The Lord does not require church attendance, I'm sure, but he would like you to have some familiarity with worship. We can do that for you."
And she led me through a typical service, giving me much-needed clues as to when I should sit, stand, or kneel, what the various symbols meant, and who the men in front of the church were. It was too much in one lesson, but by the end of the year I was grounded in the Catholic faith—and had a yearning for spiritual certainties that even Catholicism didn't offer.
There was one more lesson I took away from the convent, though it surely was not what Mama intended. Late at night when the lights were out in the dormitory room in which all the first-form girls slept, there was hushed whispering and giggling about boys.
"Eddie McAdams is soooo cute—I wish he'd kiss me!"
"Lem Samuels says he'll take me to the Christmas dance. What will I wear?"
"How many boys have you kissed, Sheila? Tell the truth!"
"Only ten," came the giggling answer, "and your brother was the best kisser of all!" A pillow sailed through the air at the heartless Sheila.
I listened to it all with amazement.
"Cowgirl, what are the boys like where you live?"
"Uh... ah,...there aren't any," I said truthfully.
"There are cowboys!" came in chorus from several girls.
"Oh, but they're all older, at least eighteen," I said, sure that they would understand.
"Older is better," said the knowledgeable Sheila. "They know things you don't. And when an experienced man kisses you..."
"Yes?" breathed an anxious voice to my right.
"Girls! Girls! Do I hear talking? Surely not. You must sleep now." Sister was making her rounds, and a hush fell over the long room with its double rows of metal cots. When Sister had had plenty of time to move on, the whispers began again.
"Tell us, Sheila—what happens when you kiss someone who knows how to kiss?"
Puffed up with superiority, Sheila sat up in the bed and shook her long red hair, now loosed from its proper daytime bun. "Well... there's kind of a tingle, kind of all over, and you feel—well, weak."
Choruses of "Oh" and "Aah" resounded around me. I couldn't imagine what she was talking about.
"That's when you have to be careful," she said, sounding as didactic as Sister Maria Theresa did in mathematics class. "If you don't watch, a boy can take advantage—touch you where he shouldn't, all kinds of things. You can't let that weak feeling take over. But oh, it's nice!"
Silence fell, soon broken by a few gentle snores, but I'm sure there were girls who lay awake for hours daydreaming about Eddie McAdams or Lem Samuels touching them in forbidden places—where, for heaven's sake? I was left to realize that I had no one, no young boy, to fantasize about. I soon invented one.
His name was James, just like Papa, though I never examined the importance of that coincidence, and he could ride like the wind. I forget—truly—what he looked like, but I know that he could ride and rope better than I, and that he liked me better than all other girls because I could keep up with him on horseback. When we rode back to the ranch at night after a long day on the prairie, he kissed me tenderly—but there my fantasy grew sparse, for I didn't know what to imagine, what forbidden places Sheila talked of in hushed tones.
* * *
Papa came for me in the spring. I thought he had dressed for the occasion, for he was resplendent in a pinstripe suit with matching vest, its wide lapels very current, and a black derby on his head, his shirt collar stiff, and below it a paisley tie carefully knotted. Years later, I realized he had probably been in St. Louis, dressed like that, for days before I saw him.
"Papa!" I exclaimed too fast, putting my mouth into action before my brain. "You have new clothes!"
"Uh, no, not really."
"Mama will be so impressed," I said, knowing that Mama would probably ask some pointed question about where he intended to wear such clothes once he got me home from St. Louis.
"I—I better buy her something wonderful to make up for all this," he said, sweeping a hand down his body as though to point to the clothes. "I wanted to look like the other fathers, Tommy Jo, when I came to pick you up. You know, make you proud."
"Like a St. Louis banker?" I asked, and then rushed on, "Oh, Papa, you look just fine—and I'd have been proud of you in high-heeled boots and a Stetson!" And I meant it—that was part of the self-possession I'd learned. My papa was who he was, not a St. Louis banker, and I wouldn't have traded. But I didn't really know much about my papa.
I said my good-byes to Sister Maria Theresa and paid the required formal visit to the Mother Superior, but when Papa asked if I didn't have friends to take leave of, I lied and said I'd already done that. Poor Papa—all dressed up and the only people who saw him were two nuns!
We didn't talk about school until we were settled on the train.
"You look different, Tommy Jo—older. I hope I—we—haven't done the wrong thing sending you there."
"I was bound to get older someday, Papa."
He turned his head toward the window, almost avoiding me. "Yes, I guess you were. But"—and then he whirled to face me—"can you still ride?"
"I hope so," I said fervently. "I really hope so."
"That's my girl!" he said, so loudly that others in the car turned to look at us.
It was left for Mama to ask the questions about French and decorum and all those things, and she was apparently satisfied with the answers.
"I—I see a difference in you," she said, having come into my bedroom late my first night back home. "You're... you know who you are."
"I had to learn," I laughed, "or else feel that a cowgirl was the worst possible thing I could be. That's what they called me, the girls."
"Did you make friends?"
"No."
"Were you lonely?" Her voice caught, as though she were sharing my misery of those past months.
"Yes."
"Oh, my child!" She wrapped me in her arms, and I could feel her tears on my face. "The things we do to fit into the world!"
I should have soothed her and told her I knew she had sent me away for all the best reasons. Now that I was home, I should have lessened her guilt, but the year had been too long, and I said nothing. Mama had not learned, any more than Papa, to be who she was. Out on a ranch in the Cherokee Strip, she was still trying to be a St. Louis society lady—and to mold me in that image.
The next morning, after breakfast, I rode with Papa. Mama stayed behind with her Home Comfort Stove and her piano.
Chapter 2
My career as a Wild West star really began with a wolf hunt staged for Theodore Roosevelt.
"Tommy Jo, you want to meet the President of the United States?" Papa stood before me, grinning fit to beat all.
"Meet him?" I asked in amazement.
"Jack Abernathy, the marshal who catches wolves by hand, is supposed to put on a wolf hunt for him next month. Some Texas cattlemen have invited Roosevelt to visit, and they've set this thing up. Luckett knows these me
n, and he's got us an invitation, says I ought to take you. TR would really be tickled by a girl who can outride any of the cowboys."
"TR?" Mama asked, with a sort of half-smile. "Do you know him that well, James?" Without waiting for him to reply, she went on archly, "Thomasina is not a cowboy."
"No," Papa grinned, "but she rides better than most of 'em, and Roosevelt admires skill with a horse. She'll do it, Mrs. Burns." He left no room for argument. Papa could almost always do that with Mama, charm her into agreeing with him. But sometimes charm didn't work, and if it was something that he felt real strong about, Papa would quit smiling and just tell Mama how it was gonna be. And she generally went along, though I often saw her clench her teeth as she turned away from him. When he called her Mrs. Burns, both Mama and I knew it was one of those times when Papa was going to ride roughshod over whatever she said or wanted.
Mama sputtered and fussed and warned, "She'll end up a cowboy, no matter what you say, unless you start treating her like a lady, James."
"But that's the whole point," he protested. "It's just because she is a lady that Luckett wants her to ride."
"Will she ride sidesaddle in a proper dress?"
I shuddered at the thought.
"Well, no... I don't think she could ride a bronc that way. She'll wear that split skirt you made for her." He smiled, back to using charm to coax Mama out of her unhappiness.
Mama had taken heavy cotton corduroy and made me a wide, full skirt that was really split into pants. It was so full that you almost couldn't tell it wasn't a dress when I walked—but I could ride astride in it. Mama had done that under duress, and she still had second thoughts about it.
"You ought to be riding sidesaddle like a proper lady," she said not once but a hundred times, "and you need to stay off those broncs. It's not ladylike."
"Mama? You're not worried about my breaking my neck?" I teased, giving her a hug.