Chapter Seven
Laura
My worries over Cecelia and Rachel were quickly quenched in work, at least while the sun was up. I could hardly stop to catch a breath with all the work to do. It was only at night, lying under the canvas, where my breath frosted on the fabric and the cold stars peered in through the smoke hole, that I could fret over them.
The first night, I held Cecelia’s nightgown, feeling a fool. It did help some though. In so short a time it had become hard to sleep without her, when once I would’ve sold my soul gladly to have a bed to myself. I thought of how we had lain together and wondered all kinds of things about it. Was that how it was meant to feel with Will? Between a woman and a man? I’d felt something like it with Will’s brother but, that was only a feeling in my body. The feeling in my heart, my mind, that I had with Cecelia, was something else. It was knowing that I was safe, that I was loved - that was wholly new. Was that something only a woman could give me? Was there a woman anywhere who felt as safe and loved with a man, as I did with Cecelia? Maybe, but I never had.
Once I started thinking, my thoughts turned to the way we’d been, how we’d touched each other like lovers. Was that the only way women could be together, or were there other ways I’d not yet guessed at? I could half-imagine some ways to join our bodies in loving, and they made my belly turn hot.
Through the excitement, the joy, came fear. Had anyone heard us? Had I even made a noise? My heart had been beating so hard, my mind racing, I couldn’t remember if one of us had cried out. Lord, what if the children or the men had heard us? I knew Tom and Rachel would say nothing of it if they had, but the thought of them having heard was nevertheless a worry that cut through me. What if one of them had come to the tent, seeking me out? What if they had happened upon us and seen?
It was strange, to fear such a thing. I didn’t feel ashamed of it though. My children had lain awake in our soddie while Will satisfied himself on me. They had seen me crying and bruised when he forced me. Those things brought me more disgust and shame than anything ever could. I only feared what would happen if outside folks got to know of what we were doing. Like colourful songbirds freed from a fairground, we’d soon be pecked apart by the local flocks.
Eventually I slept, but that nightgown never left my hand.
The weather was only getting worse, the air colder with each day. It took all my strength to gather and chop the wood to keep the stew and coffee pots bubbling away on the fire. Washing was stopped by the freezes, and my mending was the only work that could be done in the tent, by the stove. I had Tom in the tent with me at nights, as the wagon, heated only by a pot of embers, was too cold for him without Rachel there to share the bed with.
During the days, once he’d helped me with my stewing, Tom took off with Leehorn, usually coming home with firewood. I think he was making the most of Rachel being gone to get the old man all to himself. I saw them a number of times and to my amusement Tom was often wearing Leehorn’s greasy coonskin cap. They went off to the woods one of the first days Rachel was gone and came back with a deer. I saw them quartering it and how soft spoken Leehorn was, unless he was laughing at a joke of his own making.
Something in me thawed at seeing them. The way Tom beamed at Leehorn, only to turn serious when shown a technique with the knife, made me smile. I smiled still more when, several days into Cecelia’s absence, I noticed Tom in Leehorn’s office, dusting and polishing and airing it out. At least someone had learnt a little house pride from me.
Each day more men arrived at camp looking for work. They were all too late into the season to be very successful, even I knew that. They ranged from fresh immigrants from Ireland, or the Germanic places, to the hardened farmers of the southern territories, chased north by the sharp teeth of starvation.
One by one these men went to see Leehorn, and came out of his office looking angry, desperate, or just empty inside. It was not unusual for them to come straight to me and beg for food. Cecelia had helped me deal with them before she left, but such sights still troubled her soul. Mine was more used to it. I had to refuse a great number. I hadn’t the stores to go around, and wasn’t paid to feed all comers.
The only times I bent this rule was for the truly starving, who tended to be new to America. They’d come with only the clothes they stood in, or with tiny bundles of rags to their names. Hollow cheeked and blank eyed, many of them had shoes instead of winter boots, and those with holes. They were hopelessly unprepared for the winter they found themselves in. I gave them soup or cornbread from our own supply, and, fool that I was, I made more work for myself turning sacks and the rags they pressed on me as payment, into underclothes and coats for them. By nights Tom helped me to sew sacking into stockings and vests.
Without Cecelia, I was doing the work of two. As Rachel was gone as well, Tom had to shoulder her chores, though she’d been running off enough to make her loss less harshly felt. There wasn’t a day went past that Irish, Gill, or one of the other men didn’t ask after her to see if she’d come back yet. Many of them seemed to look on her as a daughter, others troubled me with their darting eyes and nervous tongues. I told myself I’d have to keep a close watch on Rachel when she returned. She’d just turned ten and was coming into her womanly looks, though she was still a girl I couldn’t trust the men to leave her alone.
The pair of them had been gone for over a week, and I was expecting them back in the next day or so, when the pains started.
I was struggling across the snowy yard with a barrowful of wood for the cook fire and had to stop for a sharp pinching in my side. I thought perhaps I’d strained myself, pushing such a weight. Tom helped me to get the barrow to the cookhouse, now mostly completed but still awaiting a roof. Leaving him to tend the steaming pots I went to the tent and sat myself down on a chunk of stump I’d taken as a stool.
Rubbing my belly absently, I got on with some mending. It wasn’t near my time yet, not by my reckoning. I still had some months to go, so the pains didn’t worry me much. If not from pushing the wood they were doubtless the result of eating something spoiled. I awaited a desperate rush to the pot but no such urge came.
As the pains worsened I abandoned my sewing and lowered myself onto my bed, trying to ease the cramps that were by this time coming quite regularly. They were familiar pains, but did not feel entirely right. I kept thinking, ‘it’s not my time, it’s not my time’. But with each pain it seemed my body was telling me ‘it’s time, I’ve made my mind up’.
A wetness in my drawers made me lift my skirts. It did not feel like my waters going. It was still coming as I pulled down my under things and found blood there, more of it staining my thighs. I felt sick and panic went through me like a poison.
Tom answered my shouts and came to the tent, peering in at me. The way his face turned white told me how bad I must look myself. I felt faint. The pains were worse, and he helped to lay me down as labour took me. The blood kept coming, and I was the most scared I had ever been.
“Ma, it’s alright,” Tom told me, holding on to my hand and shushing me as he would a nervous horse. It worked some, and he looked about us as if taking stock. “You’ll need to tell me what to do Ma, I don’t know much but I’m not leaving.”
Were I not so afraid, I’d have blessed him for that. With Nora I had been mostly alone, yet that had felt normal, I had been through birth before and hers was blessedly free of complication. This was something I was not prepared for, and I lost my head; crying for my mother, for Cecelia, begging the blood to stop coming. I was so glad he was with me, but I couldn’t tell him how to help, because I didn’t know.
My crying must have frightened Tom more than the blood, for he squeezed my hand and stood up.
“Count to twenty Ma, and I’ll be back.”
To my shame I cried out after him, but he didn’t turn back.
He ran off and fetched Leehorn from his office. The old logger dashed into the tent and stood over me, cap in his yellowed hands.
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bsp; “Good Lord, son, you did the right thing comin’ to find me alright. Mrs Deene? I’m gonna find someone as knows what to do. Tom, son, you stay right here with your Ma, ya hear?”
Tom nodded and came back to my side. I was trying to hold onto my breaths, to stop them sobbing out of me and leaving me gasping. The pains were closer together, awful and sharp like pins
Leehorn ran off, oaths falling from his mouth before he’d gone far enough to go unheard. Tom took my hand and shifted a pillow further under my head.
“Ma, Mr Leehorn says if a man gets struck with an axe, he should keep that part of himself up, over his heart, to slow the blood,” as he said this he was gathering up the bedlinens. “I’m gonna try and get you lying back like that, get you comfortable.”
He pushed me gently and shuffled the linens about ‘til I had my rear propped up and my legs open. I tried to pull my skirts down but he stopped me and did it himself.
“Ma, you lie still and rest, don’t worry about lookin’ your best. I’ll get you smartened up.”
With a damp rag he cleaned my face, cooling it. He talked to me like I was our old dog, Stick. He’d always been so soft on that dog, patiently teaching it to lie down and come when called. I think it damn near broke his heart when it died.
The thought of that summer and my poor babies, made me cry harder, and he held my hand and talked to me about the snow outside and rabbits in their winter hole, and anything and everything else he could.
Leehorn returned some time later with a young Sioux man. I lay trembling and bleeding, tears and snot dribbling on my face. When the young man pushed my skirts further aside I was too weak and scared to fight him. I was having trouble keeping my eyes fixed on him, everything before me seemed to be wavering and turning dark, as if candles were being snuffed out one by one. The smoke hole and tent poles over me spun, and I felt I was being taken into the earth. My arms were like lead, I couldn’t move them. I felt something coming away, and, with Tom holding my hand, singing my old harvest song, I fell into a blackness as total as night on the prairie.
*
I woke up, and that in itself was a small miracle. When I saw the bloodied sheets later I thought I must have been completely emptied by the time they were done. It looked as though ten women had met their ends on those sheets.
The sheets were the first thing Cecelia saw when she and Rachel came into the clearing. They’d been bundled into the washtub and left. She told me, later, that her first thought was that I’d been attacked by one of the men. When she rushed into the tent, covered in snow and wide eyed, I reached up and took her hands. Holding onto me, she sobbed like a child.
“I thought you were dead,” she cried. “Oh, oh Laura. I’m so sorry.”
“The baby’s gone,” I said. I couldn’t explain what had happened exactly, I didn’t know the whys and wherefores, or even how I had survived.
Cecelia cried, and held me, and I held on to her. I didn’t cry, then. I think I was still shaken up by the whole thing, and it took a while for things to fall into place and feel as they should. Rachel held my hand so tightly it hurt and made my fingers turn numb. I didn’t want her to let go.
Tom came in with wood for the stove, and when he saw Cecelia he hugged her hard. I saw then how afraid he’d been, though he’d hidden it well.
“What happened?” Cecelia asked, settling him on the stool.
He told her about the pain in my side, how I’d gone to rest and how he’d found me, bleeding and crying.
“I got Leehorn, I didn’t know who else to fetch,” Tom said. “He swore and went off and got a man, an Indian, and they came back here.”
“He looked at me,” I said, reaching for Cecelia’s hand. “He examined me.”
“Is he a doctor? A…” Cecelia struggled for a word, “healer?”
Tom shrugged. “I don’t know. He just checked Ma and then he had us prop her legs up more. He got me to rub her belly.”
I didn’t remember this. Clearly a lot had been done to save me after I’d lost the battle to stay awake.
A knock came on the post by our tent flap and Leehorn came in at Cecelia’s call, greasy fur cap in hand.
“Ma’am you look a sight better,” he said, standing like a nervous gentleman caller by the foot of my bed. The day before he’d been to see me. That was when I opened my eyes and realised I’d survived. Since then he’d been by a few times to check on me and babble in his usual way.
“Where’s the man that helped her?” Cecelia asked. “We should thank him. God, if he hadn’t…”
“Don’t think on it Ma’am,” Leehorn advised, “I’m only glad Wiconi got to talking with me when he came looking for work. If he hadn’t told me ‘bout his woman, I wouldn’t’ve known to go find him.”
“His woman?” Cecelia asked.
“Name of Olowa he said. Got took bad just like what happened here. He was there when one of their herbalists tried to save her. What didn’t work on her, helped here.”
Knowing that what had been done to me had failed to save that man’s wife, made me horribly aware of how easy it would have been for me to die. What little strength I had left me, and I felt cold with shock.
“If you can ask him to come by, or point him out to me, I’d like to thank him,” Cecelia said, “for now…I think Laura should rest.”
Leehorn left us and Cecelia went outside with him.
I heard them talking in low voices, but could pick up only that Leehorn kept mentioning the shed, which I took to mean the shed by his office.
Cecelia didn’t return, but I heard the ladle clanging against the largest pot. She had taken up the task of finishing the men’s evening meal, leaving me in the care of Tom and Rachel. Work couldn’t stop just because I was too sick to stand.
I dozed a bit, with Rachel still holding my hand. I woke to her worried, pale face, and tried to smile for her to let her know I was alright. But her eyes darted away. I didn’t know why she looked so guilty, but she let go of my hand and started rushing about the tent, tidying and making it neat, though Tom had already taken care of it.
After the men were fed, and the camp was still, Cecelia came back with a pot of stew for us. We barely spoke. She looked done in and I was blinking away sleep every time I closed my eyes.
“You two should stay with your mother,” she said softly, banking up the fire in the stove.
“Where’re you going?” I asked, my voice coming out like an old woman’s.
“I’ll just be in the wagon. There’s not space enough here.”
I was about to argue, to remind her that it was too cold to sleep alone outside, but she’d already gone.
That night Rachel and Tom laid down with me and I felt safe knowing they were nearby. Still I worried about Cecelia, alone in the cold wagon. She’d been in such a hurry to leave she’d not taken any embers with her to heat it, or even her nightgown.
I thought too of what I’d overheard between her and Leehorn, about the shed near his office. I knew what it meant, and that it was where they had put my baby, or the sad parts of it that I had brought into the world. The ground was too hard by far for a burial. The body of my child was in the shed, in a box – no – a bowl. I could see in my mind, blood seeping through the thin wood of a box. A bowl it would be, or a bucket. Something practical like that. Covered with a cloth.
The fear for my life was done, and in its place was…nothing. I felt grief for my child, but for myself there was only emptiness. The longer I laid awake, looking into that blankness, the more I began to see that there was something there after all. It was something I didn’t want to look at too close, that was all.
Relief.
Chapter Eight
Cecelia
After a few days, Laura started saying she was well enough to get out of bed and get on with some work. She was still pale as paper and even her lips were barely pink, but she refused to stay abed any longer. I let her have her mending basket and had Laura cut out pieces of the blue woollens I�
��d bought in town so that she could sew them into trousers and jackets. Any more than that I refused to allow. Strong as she may have been to carry on working after so many births in the past, this was something altogether different. The bloody sheets and the ruined pine needle stuffing of the tick that I’d burnt attested to that. Laura’s lifeblood had very nearly been spilled in its entirety. I was taking no chances.
No more than I had already taken anyway.
There was a voice in my mind, one that would probably always sound like Charles, no matter how far I got from him, that told me I had been the cause of this misery. I had almost caused Laura’s death; had I not feared on the prairie that Will would recover and take her from their ruined farm to some lumber camp, to work her like a slave until she dropped dead? Because of that fear I’d begged her to come to Ohio with me, despite her reluctance to go back east and be an embarrassment to me.
Yet I had done the very same thing to her that I had feared of her husband. I had taken her into the wilderness with barely any comforts to ease the harshness of our lives, let her work and work despite her delicate condition, and then left her to shoulder the burden of our fledgling business while I went away. I had led her to this. Because of me, Laura had lost another child, and almost her life.
I could hardly stand to be in her presence once my initial tearful outburst was done. Once I’d had time to realise what I’d done to her, it was all I could do to force myself to keep stirring the stew Tom had put on for the men. I couldn’t countenance the idea of sharing her bed, as though I was blameless in her suffering. I just couldn’t do it.
So it was that, on my first night returning to Laura’s side, I took myself off to the wagon and slept alone between the boxes and packages of dried goods. Most of the blankets the children had been using were now in the tent, carried there by Tom so that he could keep Laura warm. I couldn’t sleep for guilt, and for the cold that gnawed at me all around, like a greedy child on a gingerbread treat. In the morning my hands and feet were numb, and I struggled to walk to the cookhouse on legs like wooden pegs.
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