A Light in the Wilderness

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Oh, Micah would never approve. Goodness, I’ll have to be strong and keep getting stronger.”

  During Davey’s absences, Betsy stayed again near the cabin. She’d moved closer to the village of her people when Junior returned, but with the men gone, Betsy helped Letitia hang baskets of plants and herbs, roots and berries, and dried salmon from the rafters. The smoked fish cast a pleasant scent. The Kalapuya woman showed Adam how to hold a bow much too big for the two-year-old boy. She taught seven-year-old Martha to wrap hazel shoots into one of the bigger baskets for storing roots and vegetables from Letitia’s garden.

  Letitia would lie in her bed at night and consider how her life had changed in this country and all she’d learned about living in a family of her own choosing. Betsy was a school for her and her children, one she attended with anticipation when Davey wasn’t around having her do things for him. Little Shoot became a young man before her eyes, once bringing a pretty girl to help make cheese. Everything changed. Letitia wondered if finding peace in the time Davey left her meant she loved him less, or if discovering strengths within herself made it easier to live with his warts and accept her own. Perhaps her enjoying the solitary time was a sign of greater love between them. Maybe even greater trust so she wouldn’t really have needed that paper in her cupboard.

  25

  Letting Go

  Davey kept his word that year and and was only gone for a few weeks at a time. The exclusion law stood and now there was a law forbidding persons of color to testify against a white man. If a white neighbor stole something from a colored man, the courts were no recourse.

  Letitia had heard that G.B. Smith was back in the area and had married. Maybe that was why he’d left her alone after that last encounter. His young wife, Eliza Hughart, whom he’d sniffed around at on the overland journey, died in childbirth. Letitia hadn’t midwifed that birth. She didn’t know who did, but she was sure the midwife grieved the loss of the mother. The baby—named for G.B.’s brother—must have kept G.B. occupied, though the next year he married Mary Baker.

  “He’s put himself up as an administrator for public things, executing probates and wills,” Nancy told her. “His brother died last year in Hawaii and he’s been working on that estate.” With a pulley, Nancy lowered her quilt frame from the ceiling while Letitia helped settle the frame on the floor. She brought cheese and butter for the small inn the Reads now ran. “Heirs aren’t too happy with his handling of things, or so I hear. But the court keeps appointing him. Micah says he’d never do business with the man. He may not do illegal things, but Micah says he’s on the edge of ethical.”

  Letitia wished G.B.’s new wife well and prayed for her at the same time. She put Greenberry Smith out of her mind and found quiet joy in the life she’d come to lead. A small village south of them named Corvallis had sprung up, with a blacksmith shop, an attorney, and a mercantile, but she had no interest in going there. She stayed at home. She was the keeper of the hearth who stoked the fires, served friends when they came by, and welcomed Davey back when he’d been gone. She fed her children and the dog. She listened to Davey’s stories when he returned but had no desire to go to California or anywhere else. She was as free as she had ever been. She was at home in Benton County.

  Davey always returned happy, lifted his children in the air and swirled them, one by one, until their happy giggles rang through the valley in the shadow of Coffin Butte.

  “Don’t know why I leave,” he said. “Ain’t nothing as nourishing as these hills, this farm, you and these wee ones.”

  It was on one of those trips south when Davey became sick and brought the illness back.

  “Little Shoot, please go ask Mrs. Read if she take the children. They’s got their own to look after, but they like mama and papa to Martha and Adam.”

  Little Shoot had become an extension to her very being, he and Betsy, always ready to help, like family.

  “I take children. Bring back kasa with healing.”

  Letitia handed him a biscuit as he headed out.

  She didn’t want the children becoming ill and she didn’t want to leave Davey, who moaned, sweat tiny beads across his forehead, face, and neck. He couldn’t keep down even the thin gruel of boiled wheat she made for him. His body soured the room when he missed the chamber pot, but she didn’t begrudge it. He’d have done the same for her, she was sure. He was too weak to reach the privy they’d built the year before.

  “I ache all over, woman. Help me, aye, ’tis a sorry state I’m in.”

  He was a child in his sickness, a child who couldn’t be comforted.

  She cleaned the chamber pot, made herb poultices. Betsy arrived with a tin of the Sulphur Springs water. “This make him well.” It was the burning month, though the Indians burned much less now with all the split-rail fences and land someone else claimed marking new borders. But Letitia still wanted them to burn the sections of their land the Kalapuya had fired before. She saw how it kept the blackberries down and brought game closer to their door.

  Junior didn’t want his acreage fired up nor the part that had once been any of Davey’s 640 acres. “Smoke won’t do Pa any good,” Junior charged when he stopped by one time. “Make those savages put out those flames. Here, I brought him a twist of tobacco. Let him chew.”

  Davey declined and his son left with a pat on his father’s shoulder.

  Davey’s breathing had become shallower.

  “They almost done burning,” she told Davey. She wiped his face with a spring-soaked cloth, cooling. “I boil apples. Taste good for you.”

  He shook his head, smiled a weakened grin. “We had good times, didn’t we, Tish?”

  “We did.” She wiped his arms, his neck and chest. She didn’t like the tone of his talking.

  Martha ran in to show him a butterfly she’d caught in her hand and then on the floor beside the bed played Noughts and Crosses with little stones and a rubber ball. She’d brought the children back because Davey missed them so.

  Something caused the child to stop playing.

  “It all right. Your papa feelin’ poor. He’ll be better. You take your playin’ outside. Look after Adam, now. You his big sister.”

  Obedient, she rushed out.

  “You’re a good mama, Tish. Couldn’t ask for no better. The greatest gift to a man’s heart. Worth more than gold.”

  “What you doing making pretty talk to me now. You’ll be well soon and wonder why you say such kind things ’cause I’ll remember.” She pushed his thinning red hair back behind his ears.

  “Oh, Tish. Don’t be fooling yourself.”

  She felt her stomach tense.

  The clearer September air didn’t improve Davey’s breathing. She asked Micah to please go for the doctor again, and while she waited she prayed for his recovery, staring out at Coffin Butte. She wanted him to see Adam and Martha grow up, for them to know their father as he grew older. He was her husband and, she realized, her closest friend.

  “Just so weak. Can’t . . . can’t sit up.” A few days had passed.

  He’d been ill—they both had—last year in the winter of ’51. Pertussis or whooping cough, Doc called it. They stayed with the Gages those weeks, recuperating, Frances loving the presence of Martha and Adam. Both children had a mild case and Davey had recovered first and gone back to the claim, hiring a man named Walker to stay and butcher. Later he said he hadn’t realized how much work Letitia did until she wasn’t there to anticipate what he needed done or doing it before he even considered. Junior hadn’t come around to help.

  She’d recovered with Frances’s help and hadn’t been ill since, though each time the fireplace smoked back into the cabin and she coughed, she wondered if the wrenching pertussis had come visiting again.

  This illness of Davey’s in September of ’52 wore a different cloak, more threadbare, letting the coldness of the inside bleed through. Davey ached and his eyes watered and turned red. The skin of his face stretched across his cheekbones showing his skull.
She’d shaved his beard to make it easier to keep him clean and the skin on his chin was pale as flat bread. Doc Smith didn’t seem to know what ailed Davey.

  “Can you. Feed me. Soup?”

  Feed him, like he a chil’? The cowers so long gone came roaring back. “I . . . I soaks the sourdough in the beef broth, then you brings it to your mouth. You can do it. You feeds you self.” She patted his hand, his fingers wrinkled now, the nails chipped and yellowed. “It good you keeps moving, doin’ things.”

  “I . . . I can’t. Please.”

  What was wrong with her? She couldn’t feed her ill husband a simple savory soup?

  And then she knew. She knew that spooning that soup into Davey’s mouth would mean he was no longer able to tend himself and never would again. He was dying. She didn’t want to do anything that said his days were numbered, that he’d be gone. For all his warts and willful ways, she cared for him. Loved this man who was the father of her children. She didn’t mind washing his body, cleaning up his messes, trying remedy after remedy to help him through. But this . . . this need to feed him wound down her hope like a ticking clock. She took a deep breath. Tears pressed from the corners of his eyes. He reached for her hand; he was cold to the touch. She spooned the beef into his mouth, the broth seeping from his bluish lips.

  “Findin’ time like it was lost. I looked in nooks and crannies trying to find more time for us.” She wiped the corner of his mouth. “Treasurin’ the seconds, minutes driftin’ like snowflakes meetin’ on the taste buds. Did we forget to make time? Is that how I lost you, Davey Carson?” Her voice caught.

  “You made time. It’s how we found each other.” He looked up at her and smiled. “Did my best, aye. Hoping the Lord noticed.”

  David Carson died on September 22, 1852. Letitia asked Nancy to put the date into his Bible and to add Martha’s and Adam’s births as well. He had neglected to include them. He neglected many things, but he’d done as he’d said: his best. Surely the Lord would ask for no more.

  Doc Smith signed the death certificate, told her he’d let authorities know and the itinerant pastor when he came around, so she could have a service. “Best we bury him soon.”

  Little Shoot and Micah and his boys and Joseph Gage helped dig the grave beneath the apple trees while Roth lay with his nose upon his paws, watching. The children stood next to her, their slender bodies warm against her thighs. Martha wore a bonnet and Letitia a new flat-topped straw hat Frances Gage had picked up for her in Corvallis. Junior kept his hat off, didn’t say a word though he listened while Micah read from the Bible, picking the verses she’d remembered giving Nancy when little Laura had died.

  “‘A time for mourning.’ That be now.” She thanked Micah, accepted the Bible back, folded it into her chest, and then she began to sing in her low range, “I want Jesus to walk with me . . .”

  Those who knew the words joined in.

  “Why’d we put Papa in the ground?” Martha asked. They were back at the cabin.

  “His body was tired. His spirit be gone, Martha. He where he need to be. And we where the Lord want us to be too. Right here. Safe and sound.” She looked to the cupboard. She patted her daughter’s shoulder. “You play now, have a tea party with your brother with that set of dishes your papa brought back.”

  “Death part of living.” Betsy fixed mint tea harvested from the wet ground when Soap Creek flooded each spring. They sat alone, the children playing as though they understood that grief settled better within silence.

  Letitia had a little gold dust left, money not spent on buying cows and a bull and farm equipment and a good stove, all things Davey wanted. She had twenty-nine cows now. They belonged to her by Davey’s hand. She had the agreement. She’d be all right when it came time to settle Davey’s affairs. He had taken care of her and the children, like a good father would. That night in the cabin she let the light flicker in her candlesticks until they burned down to a nubbin.

  26

  Loose Ends That Never End

  The next weeks found her lost in thought as she called each cow in for milking morning and night. She made cheese, prepared for the winter months. Their years together, seven in all, had been shorter than she’d hoped for. Once she’d been uncertain, but she and Davey made a good life together, did their share to mend the wounded world being good neighbors, caring for their children, fending for themselves with room to help others. A dozen irritations through the years rolled through her mind, anger that he’d gone to California then brought back what took his life. But maybe it hadn’t. Maybe as the Scripture said, there is a time for everything. She wished Davey’s time hadn’t come so soon.

  As the weeks passed, she remembered more occasions of joys than irritations, moments that bled through the tears to stain her heart. Those would be the stories she would tell her children. Those would be the memories she’d let hold her hostage.

  No one knew when the estate would be settled. For now, they had the cabin and all the things bought to furnish it. The cattle belonged to her, all from Charity’s yield. Davey had claimed two old cows and a new calf. She expected she’d be paid the amount in the agreement, $200 per year since 1845 when they’d left Missouri. That came to $1,400. The land would have to be sold for that payment to be made. But if she received the $1,400 she’d be able to buy property somewhere, maybe in the Umpqua country in the southern part of the state. Maybe she could lease. When the executor was named, she’d give him the paper as a claim against the estate. That’s what Micah had told her to do. And she’d tell them what was hers already, what property she had earned herself these seven years. She’d set aside Davey’s watch for Junior when he came around, if he ever did. She hadn’t seen him since the funeral. Until the executor rode in, she would be the sparrow, trusting in God’s provision.

  Someone pounded on the cabin door. It was the dark of November, so early in the morning that if there’d been a clear sky the moon would have been a witness.

  “Who—who be there? Shush now.” Letitia spoke to Adam, who’d begun to cry. “You all right.” His caramel-colored face dripped with tears. “You fine.” She patted him, pulled on her knitted shawl to go to the door.

  “What is it, Mama?”

  “Nothin’, baby. Go back to sleep.”

  She picked Adam up, held him on her hip. Roth stood, head at the twist, but he didn’t bark. He hadn’t barked since G.B. struck him.

  The pounding began again and this time she recognized the voice telling her to “open up for the law.”

  “What—what you doing here?”

  Greenberry Smith pushed past her with his former father-in-law and another man she didn’t recognize crushing a letter at her chest. He jerked open cupboard doors, looked in trunks, counted dishes, his heavy brogans dropping mud.

  “Why you here?” She set Adam down, clutched at her nightdress, his paper in hand. Both children cried.

  “You two go out and count the stock.”

  “It’s still dark, G.B. We can afford to let the woman get herself decent.”

  “Write down all the tools too. Make sure you get the bull and all those hogs they got.”

  “What you doin’ here?”

  “My job.”

  “You stop!”

  “Why? You gonna pull a pistol on me? Here.” He nodded to the letter that had fallen to the floor. “Not that you can read it so I’ll tell you. I’ve been appointed executor of David Carson’s estate. He had no will—”

  “He sign an agreement. It like a will.”

  “Did he? Let’s see it!”

  Did she dare give it to him? Micah had said the executor would need it. “It in a safe place.” She should have given it to Micah. At least he was a witness that it existed, though he’d never seen it signed.

  “Come on. Give it to me.”

  The palms of her hands sweated. Thoughts like billiard balls rattled through her addled brain. Should I? Shouldn’t I?

  “Anything related to your husband’s estate is cou
rt business now.” This from one of the men accompanying G.B. He spoke softly.

  “Get out there and count stock, I tell you.” The men left and to Letitia G.B. said, “You’ll be in trouble if you don’t comply, woman. You aren’t even supposed to be inside this state. Remember that.”

  Davey said the exclusion law didn’t apply to those already here. She put Adam down; her hands shook as she opened the cupboard door and held a pottery canister to her stomach, pulling the paper out as she did. She handed it to him. He unrolled it, read it, and put it in the inside pocket of his vest.

  “No!” She grabbed at him. “I keep that. Show the sheriff.”

  He pushed her away. “Sheriff and probate court have assigned me the duty.” He grinned. “I’ll see it gets to the right place. Now step back. We’ve got to make a list of all Davey’s assets.”

  “Assets? I knows about assets. Some of what you countin’ up is my assets. The furniture’s mine. I pay Gage to make it. All the cattle ’cept Davey’s three. The dishes—”

  “Yours? You can’t own property. You are property! The only reason I don’t list you as a ‘asset’ is because no one’s buyin’ wenches these days in this free state. Rather humorous I’d say that you came all that way across the plains to find out that you’re back where you belong. In the state of Nowhere and Worthless. That’s your property.”

  The others returned.

  “Ask Sarah Davis. She know I’m free. I belong to no one. Her father-in-law the one what free me. She know I’m not property. G.B. know it too.” She turned to him. “You see my papers in Missouri. You know I free to come with Davey and work for him. He sign an agreement. Ask him!”

  “What’s she talking about, G.B.? She’s got some kind of papers?”

  “Let’s leave Mrs. Davis out of this. We’ll let the court know of our findings. You can remain here with your br . . . children until the auction.”