The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming

by J. Anderson Coats

  Unlike Mr. Mercer’s stupid pamphlet. I pull that one out and put it next to my little book. His is shabby and dingy, but it still looks like a proper pamphlet. The cover is made of stiff yellow paper and the printing is all just so.

  My little book is also grubby, but that’s because my hands are not always clean when I write reflections. The pages don’t line up properly because they’re folded ragpaper, and my title on the cover—REFLECTIONS ON WHAT’S NOT GOING—starts out big and then gets smaller as I got near the edge and ran out of room.

  I pick up Mr. Mercer’s pamphlet. I don’t know why I even still have it. I should have flung it into the lake weeks ago.

  I turn to the Introduction and run a finger over words I already know by heart: It is my hope that in these pages my readers will discover the wealth of potential and possibility inherent in the material resources of the northwest corner of this great land.

  There’s no correction. No improvement. I read that first line again.

  Potential.

  Possibility.

  I open my little book to the chapter on Seattle. It’s a full five pages long, and I’ve drawn a picture of the streets and buildings from the top of the mill road and labeled each one. I’ve listed all the stores and which are best to buy ribbons or candy, and which give the best prices for milk and cheese. I’ve written out words in Chinook by how they sound, and what they mean in English.

  There’s a single line in Mr. Mercer’s pamphlet about Seattle. One solitary mention tucked away in the chapter on Trade discussing the quality of its harbor. I flip through the pages twice, but I’ve read them enough times to know what’s here.

  Then I turn each one slowly. Everything is just as I remember it. Grazing Land. Whale Fishing. Charts full of numbers, like how many boards you can get from a cedar of a certain width.

  Nothing about bankers or bachelors. Not a single word about schoolhouses.

  I close the cover gently. It’s not lies. Not really. This is the Washington Territory Mr. Mercer sees. He’s called things as they are, just like Miss Gower said to. I’m the one who read those words so many times that I came to expect Washington Territory to be as I wanted it to be, not as it really is.

  My pamphlet, though. My pamphlet isn’t lies, either, even though the things I’ve written are different from Mr. Mercer’s. My Washington Territory is full of stumps to grub and canoes to pull and traps to check and school to go to and new friends to knit with and teach their letters and old friends to play dolls and whist with.

  I draw thick lines through my pamphlet’s old title. Under it I write an improvement: REFLECTIONS ON GOING FORTH.

  Miss Baker dismisses school after dinner. She feels feverish and can’t get warm. The smaller kids run whooping down the hill toward town while Jenny puts the fire out, Inez washes the blackboard, and I bring in wood for tomorrow.

  Then we realize we have a whole afternoon to ourselves, because our parents think we’re in school.

  “Let’s go play dolls!” Evie says happily. “The fearless Prince Pierre was in trouble, remember? Trapped in that cave by bears? Felicity and Sarabelle and the others were the only ones who could save him.”

  Mrs. D has her hearth. She might not be patting me on the head and telling me to go play, but she did say I could stay after school when I liked as long as my chores were done by bedtime. She might have said it with Dad standing at her elbow and giving her a Look, but she said it nonetheless.

  Jer has his mama, but he doesn’t need her quite like he used to. Or me, if I’m honest. He’s not a baby anymore. He’s a little boy now and his own man, and the only times he really needs one of us are when he’s hurt or scared or hungry. He can make birdcalls and play in the mud and build little houses out of wood scraps. He knows which berries to eat and which to leave alone, and when to hurry into the house.

  He’s learning to be on the Pacific coast.

  I have ordinary chores. I have wood to chop and stack. I have traps to check. I have furs to stake out and cure and treat. I have dishes to wash and drawers to scrub. On the Pacific coast a girl can fish for kokanee in the morning, smoke it in the afternoon, and serve it for supper that evening. She can pick berries and make a crumble and pull to school in her very own canoe.

  So, I go to Evie’s house. Felicity distracts the bears with a bucket of fresh dewberries while Sarabelle rushes into the cave, splints Prince Pierre’s broken leg with cedar poles, then hurries him into a waiting canoe. Meanwhile, Hyacinth has gone back to their homestead cabin and convinced all the salmon in the sound to help them trick the bears into swimming to an island where they’ll be trapped forever.

  Before I know it, the sun’s getting low on the horizon. I thank Mrs. Mason on my way out.

  As I head toward the mill road, I pass Nell on the Occidental’s common. She’s with a young man and they’re picnicking even though it’s cold and beginning to spit rain. Perhaps he’s not as boring as the last one. I wave and she waves back, then she makes a little motion of dealing cards with that spy-mission grin. I nod and call, “Sunday!”

  My canoe is just as I left it, carefully rolled on its side to keep the rain out and tethered to a sapling. I slide it into the water and push off for home.

  Near the Norley dock, Victor and William are fooling about in their canoe. As I pull past, Victor shifts abruptly and they both tumble into the lake. They come up sputtering and arguing, though, so I keep going. I’ll see them this Saturday for lessons, and for dinner and checkers and knitting, too. Hannah can knit circles around me, and I’m doing my best to learn from her, since her socks sell for twice what mine do at Mr. Pinkham’s.

  The lake is especially busy this afternoon, and there are three canoes and a flat-bottomed boat and a weary-looking coal mover from Coal Creek pulling slow but steady for the camp landing. I turn and mark the smoke rising from chimneys on the Seattle side—the Norleys’, the Grahams’, the Cartwrights’. Others I don’t know yet, but will soon enough. The lake’s not that big a place after all.

  Then I face forward. Toward the bushy green strip of cedar that’s the Eastside. Even though I don’t need the scrap of red cloth to mark our dock anymore, I leave it there because it’s pretty. Also, in case anyone’s ever out on the lake and wants to come to our front door.

  Mrs. D will be cooking the kokanee Dad and I caught. She’ll have them on cedar planks on a fire in the yard. The whole clearing will smell like smoke, but in the very best way. Or she’ll be in the garden, pulling a handful of turnips or onions to make hash. Or she’ll be peeling wapatos out on the step.

  Maybe she’ll be smiling.

  Dad will be on the edge of the clearing, grubbing a stump or chopping a tree. Or he’ll be coming up the long bank path with a string of muskrat or a sackful of wapatos on his back. Or he’ll be making cedar shakes to stack in his canoe and sell along with our skins and cheese in Seattle.

  I know for a fact he’ll be smiling.

  Jer will be looking for rabbits or whacking things with his favorite stick or feeding wapato peelings to Bad Goat. When I come crunching up the lake path, he’ll run over to me shouting, “Daney! Daney!”

  In a few years Jer will be in the canoe beside me as I pull toward school. A few years after that, maybe I’ll help him make his own canoe. Along with Lawrence, of course, and our dad.

  I glide my paddle through the water, stroke by stroke. There’s no sandy beach in sight. No palm trees or bankers, and the only schoolhouse is borrowed.

  Instead, there’s the timber and fur that provide my education. There’s Evie and Jenny. There’s Nell. There are the Norleys. There’s my complicated, ramshackle family doing its best to be sturdy like the long bank and not like the rest of the shoreline where you must constantly watch how you step.

  All of them together means I can finally call Washington Territory what it is.

  Home.

  Thanks so much to

  Katherine Longshore, Jeannie Mobley, and Megan Morrison for their valuable f
eedback on drafts of this book at all stages of its creation.

  The staff and librarians at the University of Washington, the Washington State Library, and the Seattle Public Library for connecting me with so many useful resources. A special thanks to Jade D’Addario in the Special Collections department at the Seattle Public Library for her help in providing me with access to early images of that city.

  Cecile Hansen, chair of the Duwamish tribe, for her time and willingness to provide insights into the cultural representation of the indigenous peoples appearing in The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming.

  My agent, Ammi-Joan Paquette, for her supportive guidance, her never-failing enthusiasm, and her general awesomeness.

  My editor, Reka Simonsen, for her particular brand of wisdom, patience, and intuition that made this book turn out a thousand times better than it would have on its own.

  The team at Atheneum for all their hard work making this book lovely to look at and ready for the world.

  The readers, authors, librarians, educators, and booksellers who make up the kidlit community. I’m so glad you’ve invited me in.

  J. ANDERSON COATS has master’s degrees in history and library science, and has published short stories in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The Wicked and the Just. Jillian lives with her family in Washington State. Visit her at jandersoncoats.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by J. Anderson Coats

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2017 by Matt Rockefeller

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  The text for this book was set in Goudy Oldstyle Std.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Coats, J. Anderson (Jillian Anderson), author.

  Title: The many reflections of Miss Jane Deming / J. Anderson Coats.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, [2017] | Summary: “Jane is excited to be part of Mr. Mercer’s expedition to bring orphans and Civil War widows to Washington Territory, but life out west isn’t at all what she expected”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007664

  ISBN 978-1-4814-6496-3

  ISBN 978-1-4814-6498-7 (eBook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Frontier and pioneer life—Washington (State)—Fiction. | Washington Territory—History—19th century—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877). | JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women. | JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Alternative Family.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C62 Man 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007664