Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  She wandered inside. The cabin stretched nearly twenty feet in one direction, seventeen or eighteen in the other. She hadn’t expected much, certainly not the clapboard home with parlor and washroom they’d owned in Lick Creek. It isn’t a tent, she said to herself, it isn’t a tent. This will do nicely. She sniffed, sneezed, blew her nose on a sodden hankie, sank onto the edge of the bed. Something scurried below her, tiny feet scrabbling against the hard earth below the bed, and she started. I will not cry, I will not cry. She pressed her fingers into her eyes, swallowed hard, bent over to hide her face in her lap and sobbed.

  Jabez knelt on the muddy floor in front of her and slid his arms around her waist. He said nothing, rocking her like a child, stroking her hair, until the sobs abated into an occasional hiccup.

  “I’m sorry, Agnes,” he whispered. “I would have had it ready but the weather was so good, and I needed to get the spring wheat in. And the garden—we got in the peas and onions and turnips already. There were men here to help me, and I needed them on the barn more than on the house. I can do the house myself.”

  She nodded, scrubbed a fist over her eyes. He’d accomplished so much already.

  “It’s the rain makes it worse. We’ve got the window glass now and canvas for the ceiling. I’ll fix the leaks and set up the new stove.” His voice dwindled.

  She lifted her head with a shaky smile. “I think I’m done now.” She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. “Just need a good night’s sleep. We’ll make it lovely,” she whispered. “As soon as it stops raining.”

  He laughed, willing to think all was fine, squeezed her tight, and jumped to his feet.

  “I’ll build us a fire in the stove,” Agnes said with a gulp and stood. “While you put up Jupiter. We’ll give Dick and Rose and Harrie a warm welcome.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. He kissed her and disappeared into the drizzle. She choked back another sob and set to work.

  

  Agnes’s spirits hadn’t recovered by the next morning, though she dissembled as best she could. Her head continued stuffy, and her nose was red as a raspberry. She feared to pass the catarrh to Harrie, so Rose took charge of him while Jabez plied her with a tea he concocted from a large fuzzy white-flowered plant growing along the river. The rain abated, but a heavy overcast persisted, along with a chill wind that obstinately refused to dry the bedding. The mist obscured the world beyond the barn, and the bank of cottonwoods loomed hazy along the river bank.

  Jabez arose before dawn and emptied the cabin—nearly moving the bed out the door with Agnes still in it—stripped the roof, draped canvas over the rafters and replaced the sod before lunch. It was a filthy task, and Agnes spent a grimy hour raking mud and vermin from the earth floor. Jabez tacked a tow cloth to the south wall of the barn and painted it with a paste made from rye. With several paintings and a month or two to dry, they’d have a decent oilcloth for the floor, but Agnes hoped that by then they’d find planed boards somewhere since a dirt floor in winter seemed both unhealthful and unwise. For now, she unrolled her lovely dark blue parlor carpet, and though it covered less than half the floor, it provided some warmth and introduced a touch of homeliness.

  The third day, Agnes rose with the dawn, a sunbeam glancing through the newly cut and glazed east window. A fresh breeze had chased the clouds, and the world sparkled blue and yellow and green, filled with birdsong and earth scents and the sound of the river dancing over gravel bars.

  She stepped from the west-facing cabin door and drank it in, grinned a silly grin, raised her arms and laughed and spun, then stopped in her tracks. The mountains were there—right there!—so close she believed she might reach out her hand and touch them. They had lurked there all along, hidden by the fog, silently waiting to be discovered. Though the foot hills started at least twenty miles away, they appeared in the crystal air to hover just over the cabin, rugged and substantial, swathes of dark forest on the lower slopes, patches of white higher up. They seemed to smile at her, sharing in the joke. “We’ve been waiting for you to find us,” they seemed to say. She’d glimpsed mountains from the boat and the stagecoach, but never before had she felt so close, seen anything so massive. She turned to the south. More snow-topped peaks, hazy and distant. To the west, far-off peaks behind dry hills, the hills they’d crossed journeying from Virginia City. To the north rolled gentle yellow-brown highlands, soft and comfortable. The broad rich valley stretched from the toes of one range to the toes of the next. Agnes felt protected from the wildness beyond, nourished by the possibilities within, and from that moment, the joyful sense of belonging awoke and welled up deep inside her. She was at peace. She was home.

  Within two days, the heavy strip of canvas that served as a door was replaced by a solid panel of planed boards fetched from the new Springhill sawmill north of Bozeman. The cast-iron stove dominated the south wall, its blacking a-gleam, its water reservoir full. Dick repaired the wobbly table and tacked together benches of split logs. They stowed trunks and crates around the edges of the room for storage and small tables, and the sewing machine dominated its own corner. “Curtains,” Agnes thought, “the yellow print calico will brighten this room considerably.” She stood with hands on hips surveying her little home and felt a rush of pleasure.

  46

  Agnes loved watching the wheat ripen. There were acres of it east of the barn, the acres that Jabez and two hired men plowed and planted back in the spring before she arrived. That Jabez could coax such bounty from the raw grasslands was an ongoing wonder to her; there was nothing, she concluded, that he could not do. They lost some to pesky grasshoppers; some of it shriveled with thirst. But by late August they had a respectable crop, and Jabez hired in men to cut and stook, thresh and sack and haul it to the mill.

  About that time, Rose and Dick struck out on their own. Dick filed claim to a town lot south of Bozeman, on the Sourdough Creek. He and Rose lived in a tent while he built his cabin of cottonwood logs, the first black couple in the valley, though several Negro men had settled around Bozeman. Rose took in washing, and she agreed to take the Robinsons’, saving Agnes the labor of two full days. That arrangement occasioned a weekly trip to Bozeman, an excursion both Agnes and Jabez anticipated with pleasure. There she met several of the ladies of the area—there were not many—and he talked territorial politics with the men. Always politics. Agnes feared they would never put it behind them.

  By that time, too, she had beans and cucumbers and onions ripening in the kitchen garden, melons and squash and potatoes coming along, peas dried in sacks stacked waist high in the barn. She loved digging in the rich river loam with Harrie toddling at her side, daydreaming. In her head she designed a home, a ranch house with parlor and kitchen and a study for Jabez and a separate room for Harrie and books, lots of books.

  In the evening when supper dishes were cleared away, Agnes and Harrie would perch on a bench outside the door while Jabez read aloud by the fading light of the summer’s evening from last week’s newspaper or his favorite Whitman, or a new book borrowed from someone in town. As the song of peepers and the trill and clicks of the barn swallows closed down the day, Agnes’s mind filled with the pictures Jabez's words painted.

  Jabez seemed to have endless energy: he rose with the dawn, spent the days in the fields cultivating and harvesting and digging ditches, feeding the stock, cutting sod or finishing a shed or mending harness or sharpening blades. He found time to visit the next ranch to debate farming methods, to answer the call of an ailing or injured neighbor, and of course to spend his Saturday afternoons in Bozeman talking politics and weather and the merits of a local Masonic chapter. It was as if he were making up for the way time and forward movement had stopped for four years, when the war sucked the energy and vigor out of a body. There were weevils in the cabbage and deer in the lettuce, frost blackened the tomato starts, and mice fouled a hundred-weight of peas. But the sky was an endless blue, the showery rains were gentle
and the breezes light. Life was good and both Agnes and Jabez were content.

  

  “You’d think you were thirteen years old,” Agnes said, dabbing a gooey mix of egg yolk, witch hazel and arnica on the vicious bruise below Jabez’s left eye.

  Autumn had moved in, and Jabez's plans had expanded with the chill in the air, until one day in early October he came home with another hundred and sixty acres, a seat in the legislature, and a black eye.

  Jabez flinched. “Stings like the devil,” he said.

  “Serves you right, scrapping like a boy with the neighbors.” She inspected his scraped knuckles. Harrie crouched nearby, eyes big. He hadn’t seen his papa hurt before.

  “At the risk of sounding peevish, they started it.”

  “So you bought Richard Miller’s claim, but Mr. Foster says he’s claimed it for himself?”

  Jabez touched a tentative finger to the swelling on his lower lip. “Foster won’t believe a black man has the right to claim land, says the law doesn’t recognize Miller’s claim. So it follows that Miller can’t sell his claim to me.” He reached out a hand to Harrie, who scrambled into his lap.

  “But there are lots of Negroes with claims out here. Dick for one.” Agnes stood back and studied her doctoring, leaned in to dab ointment on a cut at his hairline. “And why is Miller selling? What did you pay? How can you buy a claim that isn’t proved up yet?”

  Jabez stood, set Harrie on the table, examined a long tear down the front of his shirt. It would need to be repaired. They didn’t have the shirt goods to make a new one.

  “I paid a hundred dollars gold for the claim and the improvements he has on it. He’s decided to take off to Confederate Gulch and try his luck there. Luke Donan’s planning to lease the east section from me. Only makes sense he and I take it since it lies between our claims.” He poured a cup of coffee from the pot that always simmered on the back of the stove. “Bob Foster’s got no call to thinking he can steal it off Miller or me.” The back of his neck flushed.

  “Did you register the claim in Gallatin City?”

  “I ran into Miller while I was there seeing about the election and when he offered to sell, we hunted up Campbell and transferred the deed right away.”

  “So you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s all legal, and Mr. Foster has no claim.” Harrie’s kitten jumped onto the table next to the boy. Agnes lifted both of them off .

  “He doesn’t see it that way. He was out on the property with the Emerson boy when Luke and I rode in to look it over. Had the gall to order us off.”

  “So you threw a punch.”

  “No, he did.” Jabez gave her a pained look. “You know I don’t start things.”

  “I know your temper. Why didn’t you just go for the sheriff?”

  “He and the boy were busy loading up lumber Miller’d stacked there for his house. I’d just paid for that lumber. Luke and I unloaded it.”

  “And they came after you.”

  “The boy doesn’t know a thing about how to fight. Can’t be more than seventeen anyway, skinny as a sapling. Luke took him down in no time.”

  “And you took down Mr. Foster.”

  “Wasn’t hard. I’ve got about fifty pounds on him.” He leaned against the table and sipped his coffee.

  She sank onto the bench and sighed. “It’s so disagreeable to be bickering with the neighbors. Folks tend to take sides. As we well know.”

  Jabez grinned, his face brightening. “Well, we can be pretty sure the neighbors are on our side. They just elected me to the legislature.” He laughed like a little boy with a new pony. “Out of thirty-four votes I got thirty-two.”

  Agnes drew in a sharp breath. “You told them you’d stand?”

  “I didn’t say yes.” He reddened and swiveled his eyes away from hers. “But I didn’t say no.”

  “And when do you expect to have the time to farm your new claim?”

  “I’m thinking of running beef cattle on that one. Won’t take but some men to ride herd on them a couple times a year.” He sat down across from her and reached for her hand. The kitten hopped into her lap, and Harrie pulled at her skirts. Jabez’s face brightened again, full of enthusiasm and plans. “The sessions won’t take much time. Month or two a year. It’s a chance to forge something new, be in at the start of something, be in charge. I’m tired of being on the losing side, there’re plenty of good Missouri men here and we can make this territory a showplace.”

  Politics would intrude again in their home. After its legacy of death and horror stretching over the past decade, Jabez continued in its thrall. In a territory without laws, with land free for the taking and the misuse, where gold worked its insidious evil. Politics, civilization, would intrude and threaten their happiness all over again.

  Agnes squeezed his hand, stood, and turned away. “I’m very proud that your neighbors have honored you so.” She fussed at the stove. “We’ll have a special dinner tonight to celebrate our growing plantation and your rising star. Now take these two little animals outdoors”—she handed him the cat and gave Harrie a gentle shove—“and let me get to it.”

  Jabez tucked the kitten in the front of his torn shirt, swung his son onto his shoulders and threw her a kiss. She watched them duck into the bright October sunshine. Could there be a more aggravating man? And could she love him any more than she did?

  

  The dying months of 1865 and the first of the new year brought snow, sleet, and below-zero temperatures. A quick trip to the privy was positively bone-chilling. Ice encased the river, wind swept the pastures clean, deep velvety nights descended by mid-afternoon. Those days passed in chores and contentment, evenings by the stove reading, sewing, talking, the three of them generating their own warmth.

  When early spring rolled in at the beginning of March, Jabez left for Virginia City to attend the legislative session, and Agnes’s mood turned dark. She grumbled at having to feed a half dozen strange hired hands who plowed and planted and cared for the stock, and she resented the milking and churning, planting and weeding, cooking and baking and mending without Jabez by her side. And chasing after a child of twenty months to be sure he didn't fall in the river or out of the hay loft or under the hooves of the mules didn’t help. She was cross with everyone.

  Jabez returned six weeks later and tried to entertain her with tales of the politics of the fledgling territory and the antics of Governor Meagher. He told her anecdotes and sad stories about the characters who peopled Virginia City, about the legislators and their wives, the connivances and personalities that drove the machinery of territorial government. And glad as she was to see him, she was not always entertained.

  Within a week her snit evolved into full-fledged illness, starting with a cold and progressing to chills and fever. Jabez put her in bed with hot bricks, soaked her feet in warm water, dosed her with flax-seed tea and compound of lobelia and kept the cabin at boiling temperatures.

  He convinced Rose to leave Bozeman and stay with them to care for the house, the meals and Harrie during her illness. Ten days passed before she left her bed, limbs feeling like wilted lily stems, her chest and throat achy and raw. Jabez pronounced her on the mend and immediately packed a valise.

  Agnes watched him in dumb misery. “Where are you going?”

  Jabez took her hand in his and touched his lips to her knuckles. “I must leave you to Rose’s care for a time,” he said. “I’m off to Virginia City to see the lawyers.”

  “But you were just there. Didn't you see them during the session?”

  He shook his head. “They set a court date after I left. I've put it off as long as I can while you were sick. It can't be postponed any longer.” He stacked the lunch plates and pushed them aside. “Bob Foster is determined to sue me over the Miller property, and if I don’t respond right away I’ll default.”

  “That’s going to
cost a penny.” Jabez seemed to seek out controversy, and it put her out of sorts all over again.

  “Dick's taking a wagon load over. We'll go together.”

  “Well, then go.” She fussed with Harrie’s damp curls and pouted.

  “Don't overdo. Let Rose handle the housework.” He leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. “Anything I can bring you from the big city?”

  She lifted her eyes and studied him. Lines streaked his forehead, creased the corners of his eyes, his skin burnt by work in the sun and wind, his beard and hair shot with grey. She stroked his hand and whispered, “Just yourself.”

  “Always, love.” He squeezed her hand, picked up his valise and the medical bag that went everywhere with him. “I should be back by Saturday.”

  Rose stepped in from the yard, and Jabez threw an arm around her shoulders, gave her a hug. “Take care of my girl.” Rose smiled and nodded. “Make her get outside tomorrow.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He filled the doorway and for a moment, the house darkened as he shut out the sunlight. Then he was gone.

  47

  June 1866

  Bob Foster and the Emerson kid declined an offer to settle the lawsuit, and Jabez foresaw an expensive and time-consuming fight, but he refused to stand by while they stole his land through the courts. He’d hired a raft of lawyers, and he steamed and grumbled to Dick and to himself all along the road. Then to add insult, before noon on the second day of the return trip Dick’s left front wagon wheel dropped in a rut and cracked, and they spent a couple hours altogether cobbling it enough to get them home. Jabez wanted to speed Jupiter on ahead, as the patched wheel bumped and rattled and slowed the wagon even more than usual, but he hated to leave Dick behind.