Miriam rode her horse closer to the wagon and hopped inside with Kade. As the two looked over the way they had come, they held hands and leaned into each other, knowing that the way before them was going to be so much better because of the other
Mary’s Memoir
Chapter 1
My name is Mary Callahan. I’ve put down this short account of my life on account of how consarn flustered I am over everything that’s happened. I won’t waste any time giving you the details of my life’s history, my background, and suchlike. Suffice it to say that I was raised in the normal way, grew up in the normal way, was courted in the normal way, and lived through all the boring tedium of balls and dances and sitting in stuffy rooms with stuffy women who had nothing else on their mind but what their menfolk were doing. A life such as that did not agree with me. I refused every offer of marriage that came my way, for every man that I met was such a bore. Men threw presents at me, threw themselves at my feet, professed their undying love, told me that we would be together forever if I only I agreed.
There was one man by the name of Luke Kingston who had seriously courted me. He was a young man of twenty-one who stood to inherit his father’s textile factory. He had enough prospects to make me think about what a marriage to him would be like. It would be pleasant, as far as it went. Perhaps he would even allow me to express my own opinions, read my own books, act as though I had a mind of my own. Perhaps, if I was very lucky, he wouldn’t take the course that so many other husbands had taken of shutting their wives away once the novelty of marriage wore off. Marriage was always a risk for a woman, one that too many women around me dashed into at the first opportunity, never aware of what might await them in later years.
I don’t mean to say that he was a bad sort. He was well enough, I suppose. He had a kind face and a gentle disposition. He was drawn towards the excesses of consumption or of socializing. If he had vices, I’m sure they were trifles- at least in comparison to the stories I heard from other women who plainly expressed what they felt during the endless soirees which I had to attend. Rather,he had used all the flowery romantic language that men use when they are trying to convince a woman to marry him. I found such talk hard to accept, for I saw it as what it was: a bribe.
A man may bribe another man to get what he wants. A bribe, after all, is nothing more than a payment for services rendered or goods received. Society affects to name commerce payment when the transaction is legal and bribery when it is not. Though I might say that a man offering me flowers might be called an advance payment for future services rendered, those posturing men never felt as honest as the shopkeepers and store owners I knew in Boston. Instead, they were more like the slimy weasels who managed to get themselves elected to public office. They said one thing, and then turned right around and did another. Had I kept my wits about me when I met Matthew, I might have realized that he would do the same, just as any other man would- for once you give a person control over anything, be it a house or a country, the promises that he made in the best of faith are soon forgotten.
Our marriage started off well enough, mind you. He made no bones about wanting to out west to the frontier to seek his fortune or, if a fortune could be found, a modicum of autonomy. Boston in 1858- the year in which he asked for my hand- was not the bustling metropolis that the world imagines it was. To be sure, there was money enough to be had if a man was willing to work hard enough for it. A man could live a comfortable lifestyle if he worked for years on end and saved up as much money as he possibly could. Yet that depended on whether a man knew the right people, whether he could discreetly put money into the right hands, and most of all whether he could tolerate being stepped on by those he considered his inferiors. Boston was a city where pull mattered more than anything.
It was precisely that sort of city that Matthew wished to leave. He longed for the frontier where, as he understood it, a man’s word was bond and where the tendrils of corruption had not yet made themselves known. He read stories of Indians riding bareback across the open plains. He talked to me at length of those free spirits, who went where they wanted and did what they wanted. He wanted that kind of freedom in his life. He wanted his personal effort, not his personal acquaintances, to reflect how his circumstances changed or didn’t change.
When I, a young woman of twenty years, heard him expound such ideas to me, a sensation came over me that I had never felt before. I had met men who were to be tolerated. I had met men that were to be avoided. I had even met men who, after meeting them, I wished that I could forget having made their acquaintance. It had not happened to me until that point that I had met a man that I wanted to follow. Not only follow, of course, but follow to the ends of the world if he was of a mind to go there. He understood what it was like to live in a cage in which one could sing but never fly.
Our courtship lasted six months, and this only on account of my father insisting that we wait that long to be sure that we both had not flown into a passion that would soon cool down. It would not have mattered if he had asked to wait a full year, or even two years. There was no one else who could rescue me from the boredom of drawing room gossip and the polite stifling courtesy I found all around me. There were days when the frustration built inside me so much that I thought I must surely go mad, or else tear myself to pieces.
I write of these things now for, as the reader may have guessed, I did marry Matthew. He did move out to the frontier where he set himself up as a wheat farmer and a cow rancher. I’m told that in other frontier territories like Wyoming, it is rare to see a man be both. Yet Matthew found himself in possession of enough land to manage both. Of course, it goes without saying that it is next to impossible for a man to grow wheat and manage a herd of livestock all at once. For that reason, he set several persons up in gainful employment. Some shucked wheat, some transported hay, and still others punched his cows.
That is the local terminology out here, of course. A cowpuncher is not someone who literally punches cows. I suppose that is where the name came from. I suppose that at one time, some mean-spirited men roamed through the countryside, landing blows upon the cattle they were paid to look after. A man from the eastern United States would call a cowpuncher a cowboy. The meaning of these words is the same.
For several years- I reckon the number to be around twelve- I worked around the house and in the fields with men who stopped by our little part of the world on their way to somewhere else. We soon prospered. Our prosperity was such that we could sustain ourselves through the early frosts, the bad harvests, and the other various misfortunes that befalls anyone who sets himself up to make his living by working the land. I thought the day might come when Matthew would sell all his land to a wealthy investor and retire on a pile of cash so large that he wouldn’t be able to spend it all if he lived to be two hundred years old.
That had certainly seemed to be the case until Jacob Renmyer came to work for us. It was because of him that I found myself sleeping in a strange bed by myself for the first time in more than a decade. It was because of him that I to buy a revolver and figure out how to use it all on my own. At the time, I did not know even know whether I wanted to shoot anyone. The gun felt good in my hands. I enjoyed the feeling of the cold steel clasped between my palms. I even enjoyed the rocking fiery explosion the gun produced when I pulled the trigger.
Chapter 2
The town of Sawtooth, Nevada is much like any other small town out on the frontier. There’s a wide strip of dirt that runs through the middle of the town. Along that strip, every shop and office a person might wish to find is located there. The houses- most of them under construction by the year 1874- sat in rows behind the businesses. There was a bawdy house, a saloon, an office for the sheriff, a doctor’s office, two general stores, a bank, and a small courthouse. Of much greater importance than any of these was the open field at the end of the town where people brought their wagons every Saturday to trade what they would with one another. People traded horse feed for seed, seed f
or tools, and tools for feed. As there happened to be a blacksmith in the area, the general store often lost business to a man who could forge rakes, hoes, shovels, and all manner of implements himself. Bartering of a Saturday allowed Matthew and I to be successful, for I had a better head for prices than he did. While he left town in search of supplies, as he often did every weekend, I remained to trade up whatever I could. Although my husband dealt in cows and wheat, I dealt in odds and ends of all sorts. It even happened that, one Saturday, I drove the wagon to the market with a rocking chair and wagon wheel in the back. Any object that a person could produce, I could get a good price for.
It was at the barter market that I met Mr. Renmyer. He was a man of average size with big hands and a wide chest. He wore a red flannel shirt and blue corduroy pants. He had worn leather gloves on his hands. That made him a man of some means, for most cowpunchers could not afford gloves. They let their hands get eaten alive by wood chips, brush burns, and calluses until their hands became rough as leather itself. A man who spent his life working in a printer’s shop could always be differentiated from a man who worked in the wild. The man who worked in the wild could prove his years of effort simply by turning over his hands.
On account of his wearing gloves, Mr. Renmyer had fewer calluses than most. He sometimes looked like a man who had been at his job for a short season, instead of the year and a half that he had been working for Matthew, and the additional amount of time that lay behind him, however long that might have been. When he led Matthew’s cattle out to the river to drink, he did so with an expertise that only came from experience. He knew how it was that a man could change the brand on any particular cattle to make the C with four diagonal slashes at each corner- Matthew’s brand- into an O with an X through it. Doing so was not difficult. Recognizing when such had been done required a man to kill one cow, then look at the other side of its pelt. No amount of cleverness could conceal the marks that were found there.
As often as not, Mr. Renmyer had no need to butcher any of my husband’s cattle to check whether anybody had rustled any part of the herd. The Pinkertons had come to Nevada right around the time when Matthew and I set ourselves up on the farm. In the twelve years that we worked there, the Pinks- for so the men who belonged to the organization were called- had showed up to proffer what advice they could. The previous year, a man named Jesse James had robbed a train in the town of Adair, Iowa. The newspapers all across the frontier came alive with the news that the Adams Express Company engaged the services of the Pinkertons to hunt down the James-Younger gang. They passed through Sawtooth now and then to ask around about the gang. The people who sheltered the gang members were former members of the confederate army. They still carried a great deal of antipathy for the union cause, even nine years removed from the defeat of the confederacy. If those folks could not take up arms against the union government, they could at least shelter those who disrupted the normal flow of commerce of several northern business concerns. As the Pinkertons had gained a great reputation in a short of amount of time, every time they came to Sawtooth, the town got quiet. A Pink might be shot in the wild, perhaps, but never in town, never with witnesses.
When I cast my mind back to the turbulent first few years during which the civil war raged in the eastern half of the continent, I remember those years as chaotic. There were always people up to no good. There were wild troublemakers who would just as soon drink themselves into a stupor as they would do an honest day’s work. They were men who lived from moment to moment, with never a care for the future. By the time the Pinkertons came to Sawtooth, the troublemakers had largely disappeared. Had they stayed in spite of everything, Mr. Renmyer might not have put the advertisement in the two newspapers that he did, and in consequence, Matthew would not have been inspired to follow his example.
I’ve spent the last week at a makeshift campsite five miles from town with nothing but several pieces of paper, pen, ink, and enough supplies to last me a month. During that whole time, I’ve done nothing other than trace back each incident to the final conclusion. We each build our own worlds, block by block, a little at a time. I built mine. I’ve been trying to understand how it all happened, for I never would have imagined anything of the sort occurring when I was twenty years old and pining for a life on the frontier.
Chapter 3
Matthew had in his possession a newspaper from Boston. It didn’t matter to him that the paper was yellowed and on the point of falling apart. He found the newspaper’s mailing address. He sent his advertisement with a few coins inside. It took two months before an issue of the paper returned to Matthew with the advertisement in it. By then, the divorce papers had already been filed.
As far as I have been able to discover, there weren’t many laws in Nevada directing courts what to do when presented with a petition of marriage annulment. Even then, the individual towns don’t always follow the state law. The judge of Sawtooth, a man named Rupert Williams, did more or less what he wanted. He was an older man who had come to Nevada after Atlanta burned in the Civil War. His southern attitudes and mannerisms became more prominent as he grew older. By the time he turned the venerable age of seventy-one, he might have been mistaken for senator, or a prominent pastor. He walked with a dignity that came easily to him. Even when his legs started to fail him, the addition of a walking cane only made him appear more stately, more regal. He walked around town in any one of his twelve business suits, which only made him seem more deserving of the respect that was due him in his capacity as a judge. Few people owned more than two business suits. There was neither any call for them, nor money to spend on them. As a result, whenever he made an appearance in town, people noticed.
I certainly noticed, especially when I came in to buy lye soap at one of the town’s general stores. My husband and Judge Williams were walking side by side. I thought that was an innocent enough affair. It often happened that ranchers did not clearly define the borders of their lands. Fences were put up, sometimes. But fences could be torn down. The ranchers and farmers of the area looked to Judge Williams to settle disputes between who did what, and who owed what money. Matthew had gone to see the judge more than once for adjudication on such matters. Though I don’t know precisely what those matters were, or how they were resolved, I am sure that they occurred, for Matthew became familiar enough with the judge that the elderly man permitted Matthew to call him by his Christian name.
Had I known what they were about then, I would have put a stop to it. Never mind that I would have been making a fool out of myself. Never mind that I would have been giving everyone in town a reason to gossip. I would have done my best to obstruct their business as best I could, even knowing that I could only delay their business for a time. I would have done it, for I love Matthew with all my heart. Even now, writing this chronicle, after all that has happened, I find it impossible to deny my true feelings to myself. Every person only gets one chance to find their true love. I had found mine. I had no intention of leaving him.
Matthew sat me down one Sunday afternoon. He had a folder full of papers in his hand. Despite years of working in the sun, time has not robbed him of the youthful vigor that was present in his appearance from the time when, as a twenty-three year old, he came up with the notion of striking out to the frontier by himself. He was thirty-five years old now. He looked younger than I did, even though I was aged thirty-two. When I considered my appearance in the mirror, I put my own age at forty-four. Lines had appeared around my eyes and my lips. I never could get rid of the dark circles that plagued my eyes, no matter how much I tried to sleep. My lips were no longer full and rosy. My skin, once so white that it needed little in the way of powder, had become so tanned that no one would ever mistake me for the daughter of a rich man that I was.
Matthew, meanwhile, had a smooth face with sharp green eyes. He had let his hair grow out. It had become full and brown. Each half hung over his shoulders, like that of an Indian. He had grown strong during his years on his ranch. His
body, once that of a clerk who had been nothing better than a literate errand boy, now had all the musculature of someone who devoted his life to lifting heavy objects. Not only that, but he had grown more outspoken, more firm in his convictions. Every man who interacted with him knew where they stood. His name had become known throughout the state. Anyone who wanted to have a drink with a fair-dealing, fair-minded man had only to seek out Matthew Callahan.
I don’t want to say I was envious of him, even though I was. Such a sentiment I could never express aloud. I have always held the supposition that every woman is jealous of her husband. A husband stands astride the whole world. He can go where he will and do what he will. A wife can only stand behind him and support him in whatever way she may. I had been taught that from the time I learned how to speak. I saw nothing in the world to suggest that it would ever be otherwise.
We were in the living room at the time. I was standing. I don’t remember why I was standing. I only recall that I was standing upright with my back straight while he sat down in a rocking chair- one that I had bartered for. He leaned back in the chair with one leg crossed over the other. Whenever he took his ease- a rare enough circumstance- he looked like as though he had done everything he could do with his life. A look of deep satisfaction settled over his face during those moments. It had settled over his face when I stood in front of him.
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