We walked into the town, past doors that were open. People called out to each other in a friendly way. Women worked vegetable patches, and I saw flowers everywhere. Children ran past, barefoot, kicking up the dust in the street. Two boys knelt in the dirt playing marbles, and a girl who was pushing a hoop smiled at me and shouted, “Hi.” When she saw Barebones, she held out her hand. “Come here, doggie. Is he yours?”
“His name’s Barebones,” I said.
“Ain’t he swell!” she said, before pushing her hoop ahead of us down the street. I thought Golden was swell, too.
“Well, Meggie?” Pa asked, as he caught up with us.
I looked up at Ma, trying to make out what she was thinking. But Ma’s sunbonnet hid her face. Pa was looking at her, too.
“I like it,” I said, but Ma didn’t respond.
At the end of the street, Pa turned off and stopped the oxen in front of a small house. It was made of logs, but they weren’t round. “We squared them off with an ax,” Pa explained. The house had a door that was painted red and a window with four panes of glass. There were glass panes in the second story, too. Each window had an iron bar across it to keep intruders from coming in.
“This is our house,” Pa said. “It won’t be clean inside, because nobody’s lived here since I left. I hired a man to keep a watch on it so that nobody would get in and claim it. Folks do that sometimes because buildings are so scarce. But it looks like it’s still ours.” He took a large iron key from a pocket in the wagon sheet and inserted it into a lock on the door. The key scraped, and Pa and Uncle Will had to jolt the door, but it finally opened.
Ma peered inside, taking in the rough wooden table and chairs and the two beds built into the corners. A cook stove stood at one end. Everything was covered with dust. The floor was dirt.
“Look at the view from the front door,” Pa said proudly. “The mountains are on your doorstep.”
Ma was quiet. I could tell she was thinking. She walked out back, where Pa showed her the space for her garden, a sunny spot where she could plant the seeds she’d brought along in our medicine chest. She came around to the front again and put her head inside, looking up at the second story.
“There’s a ladder inside to reach the loft. That’s where Will and Catherine will sleep,” Pa explained.
Ma said nothing. She had turned her head to look at the dirt roof. I thought that Ma would never want to live in a house that was dirt top and bottom. But then she began to laugh, the way she had that time Abigail and I had tied Miss Browning’s shoelaces together under the table.
Pa looked at her with concern on his face, while I wondered if Ma was so upset at the house that she’d gone crazy.
But at last, Ma caught her breath. “Look at that, Emmy Blue,” she said, and pointed to the roof of the house. Dandelions and bluebells and red blossoms that Pa called Indian paintbrush were growing on the dirt roof, along with other flowers whose names I didn’t know. There were so many that the top of the house was a blaze of color. “We have flowers blooming on our roof. Did you ever see such a funny sight? Wait until I write Grandma Mouse about it. She will be charmed.” She chuckled a little, and then shook her head. “I believe I could live in a house that has a roof of flowers, a roof that makes me laugh. Come inside, Emmy Blue.”
“I am beholden to you, Meggie, for coming all this way and being such a dutiful wife,” Pa said. He grinned at me, then whispered, “I guess your ma’s going to stay.”
“She has a stout heart,” I told him.
Pa nodded. “I knew it all along.”
And then Ma said to me, “This is the end of your quilt walk, Emmy Blue. We are home.”
Chapter Twenty
RESCUING MRS. BONNER
“I believe I will like this place, this Golden,” Ma told Aunt Catherine and me as we cleaned the cabin.
“There isn’t much to housekeeping in a home this size,” Aunt Catherine replied with a smile, her hands smudged with the blacking she was rubbing onto the cook stove. “We are going to have to sit on the bed while we cook.”
That day, we brushed the cobwebs off the ceiling, washed the walls and the furniture, and swept the floor, though Aunt Catherine pointed out there wasn’t much use to sweeping since the floor was dirt.
We met one of our neighbors on our first day in Golden, too. We were making up the beds when a woman from across the road came over with a loaf of bread still warm from the oven. “Wheat bread was the thing I longed for most during my months on the trail,” she said. “You just can’t bake it properly over a campfire. The first day I was here, I knocked on the door of a stranger and asked if I could use her oven for my bread. She understood.”
Ma had just unfolded her Feathered Star quilt to spread on her bed, and the woman peered at it. “God bless me, I can see you piece. And such lovely work.” She lifted a corner of the quilt and studied the stitches. “I brought four quilt tops with me, thinking I’d finish them here, but there’s not a place where I can find batting or muslin for the backing.”
Ma frowned at that. “No place to buy yard goods? I’ve never heard such a thing. Isn’t there a general store?”
“Yes, but all it stocks is shoddy, that cheap fabric that falls apart with one washing, and that at high prices.”
“I promised my daughter that as soon as we were settled, I would buy her a piece of material to back the little quilt she made on the trail,” Ma said. “And I would dearly love to make myself a dress or two. You see, there wasn’t room in the wagon for my clothes, so I had to wear them all for much of our trip. Now, instead of one worn-out dress, I have three. Women here will think I’m shoddy, too.”
Our neighbor only laughed. “Why, if you had new dresses, we’d think you were putting on airs. You’ll find things are different here. We don’t judge. We take folks as they are.” She started back to her cabin, then called over her shoulder. “I’ve been baking pies. I’ll bring you one for your supper if you don’t mind. It’s no botheration.”
“Dried apple pie?” I asked.
“Oh, heavens no. Pie plant.”
I didn’t understand, and Ma whispered, “Rhubarb.”
The woman smiled. “It was the first thing I planted when I came here two years ago. I couldn’t look another dried apple pie in the face.”
After the woman left, Ma said, “Did you hear that, Cath? She said there’s not a place in Golden to buy yard goods. I guess we will have to tear up our dresses for scraps for our quilts.”
“But first, we must find dresses to replace them,” Aunt Catherine said.
We were busy that first week, arranging the cabin, planting a late June garden, and cooking the things we had all missed on the trail. It wasn’t until several days after we arrived that we had time to visit the stores.
“That’s my only disappointment with Golden,” Ma said after we left the general store. “There are plenty of gold pans and men’s overalls and work boots, but not a thing for a woman to stitch.” The store had three bolts of fabric, which Ma had asked the clerk to take down. She’d fingered each one, then shook her head. “They wouldn’t survive a washing,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” the shopkeeper had told her. “You’ll find no better.”
As we walked along the streets, Ma glanced this way and that. At first, I thought she was looking for a dry goods store. But then she paused and stared at a woman climbing down from a wagon. Ma took a step toward her, then stopped and told Aunt Catherine, “It’s not her.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Mrs. Bonner. I thought she would have arrived in Golden by now. Perhaps their plans have changed.”
“I suppose we shall never learn,” Aunt Catherine said.
But as it turned out, we did learn.
Pa and Uncle Will had already started building the business block. While Ma, Aunt Catherine, and I took care of the house, Pa and Uncle Will used our oxen to grade the building site that Pa had purchased more than a year before. They needed help, so t
hey went to The Prospector, a saloon and gambling hall, where someone had told them the bartender kept a list of men looking for work.
The first person they saw when they went inside, Pa later told us, was Mr. Bonner. He was sitting at a table, drunk as a pigeon, playing cards. Pa said he tried to ignore him, but Mr. Bonner spotted him, threw his cards on the table and greeted Pa like he was an old friend. “Hatchett, you’re just the man I want to see.”
Pa turned away and went to the bar to ask for the list of workmen, but Mr. Bonner followed him, Pa said.
“I could use the loan of a twenty-dollar gold piece. I’m a good poker player, but I have had a string of bad luck. That or someone over there is cheating.”
“Sorry. I haven’t got twenty dollars to spare,” Pa told him.
“Ten then.”
Pa shook his head.
Mr. Bonner sneered at him. “I guess that means I’ll have to put my wife to work,” he said, looking around him. “There’s always work for women in these places.”
Pa told us how angry he got at what Mr. Bonner said, “You would force your wife to work in a saloon? She is a lady.”
Pa turned around, walked out of the saloon, his hands balled into fists. “I was afraid I would hit him,” Pa told us.
“Poor Lucy,” Ma said. “I wish we could help. He’ll wear her out if she lives long enough.”
“It’s not our business,” Pa said.
The next morning, Pa and Uncle Will went to work early, as usual, but Pa didn’t come home for dinner. Uncle Will explained that Pa had gone on an errand. Late in the day, Pa came to the cabin and said to Ma, Aunt Catherine, and me, “Come with me, all three of you.”
“Whatever for?” Ma asked.
“You’ll see.” Pa led us to the edge of town where several covered wagons were parked. “Wait here,” he said, as he climbed onto the wheel of one and called, “It’s Thomas Hatchett.”
“Go away. Please,” Mrs. Bonner said in a voice so low that we could barely hear her.
“I’ve brought my wife and my sister-in-law, and Emmy Blue, too.”
“No. I can’t see them.”
Ma gestured for Pa to get down, then she stepped onto the wagon spoke and said, “Lucy, it’s Meggie.”
“No.”
That didn’t stop Ma. She climbed into the wagon and exclaimed, “Why, the monster! What has he done to your arm?”
“I fell.”
“No, he pushed you, or worse. And what about the fresh bruises? Oh. Lucy, come with us. Surely anything is better than this.”
“Where could I go? I’d be disgraced,” Mrs. Bonner said.
“You could go with us. We will take you in. And, disgraced? This is Golden. People in Colorado Territory are not so taken with convention as they were back home. I’ve learned that already. They would know your husband’s treatment of you is not your fault.”
Ma drew Mrs. Bonner to the edge of the wagon. As Mrs. Bonner came into the sunlight, she bumped her arm against her side and winced.
“Mrs. Bonner, you can sleep in Emmy Blue’s bed with her. You are coming home with us.”
“I would be such a burden,” Mrs. Bonner said, but she let Ma lead her from the wagon.
“Your ill treatment by your husband would be a greater burden on us,” Pa replied. “Meggie is right. We should have insisted you leave Mr. Bonner the moment you reached Denver.”
Ma helped Mrs. Bonner to the ground, then Pa climbed back into her wagon and removed the sacks and boxes that contained her things, and we all carried them down the street to our cabin. As we were walking along, Pa told us, “I searched all day for her.”
“You did the right thing,” Ma said. “Lucy is in misery so deep she can hardly talk. But what if Mr. Bonner comes after her?”
“I did some checking around. It seems Bonner is a known card cheat and troublemaker, and he is not welcome in Golden. The sheriff promised to talk to him as soon as Mrs. Bonner was safely in our hands. He’ll tell Bonner to leave, or else he’ll get thrown into jail. He’ll let him know that if any harm comes to Mrs. Bonner, the men of Golden will see to him.”
“You’ve said all along that we should not interfere. What changed your mind, Thomas?” Ma asked.
Pa smiled at her. “My wife was willing to give up her family and old friends to start a new life with me, a change she didn’t want to make. I got to thinking it was only right I change, too, and that meant interfering in something that isn’t my business. Your friend’s life is worth a little change of mind.”
If I had to think of something good to say about Mr. Bonner, it was that he did not make his wife wear all of her dresses at one time as she crossed the prairie. She brought trunks of clothes with her in the wagon. The first thing she did after she moved into our cabin was to give dresses to Ma and Aunt Catherine, much to their delight.
“We are so grateful to you. Our old clothes are in tatters now, all of them,” Ma said. “We will save the good parts for scraps, and the rest will do for rags.”
With the new dresses ready to be worn, Ma ripped up the old ones. She clipped the places that were not worn and cut them into diamonds for a star quilt. She saved one large square of fabric and said it would do for the backing of my Indian Rescue quilt. I had already stitched the squares together, so one afternoon, she cut a piece from one of my old dresses to fit Waxy’s quilt top. Ma, Mrs. Bonner, Aunt Catherine, and I sat in the yard, quilting the top to the back.
“There’s nothing to use for a batting between the two layers, except rags, and Waxy’s quilt is too good for that. So we’ll skip the batting. This will be a summer quilt,” Ma said. She shook her head. “I never knew a town that didn’t sell batting.”
There was no quilt frame either, so the four of us passed around the little quilt, each taking a few stitches.
“It’s too bad there’s not a special store where you can buy yard goods and batting and needles and such,” I said. The remark surprised me, and I wondered if I was beginning to like sewing.
“Yes, a pity,” Ma replied, then stopped her stitching. She turned to Mrs. Bonner. “That is exactly the solution to your dilemma, Lucy. You can open a sewing store that sells just what Emmy Blue mentioned. There isn’t a woman in Golden who wouldn’t be thrilled to have a place to buy yard goods. Now they have to write home for what they want, and it takes months before the goods arrive. You could sell calico and muslin, Lucy, maybe even silk and velvet later on if there is a demand for it. You could stock all the findings, too—buttons and snaps and twill tape, thimbles and thread, even trimmings. If there’s room, you could put up a quilt frame in the store so that women could set-in their quilts to be stitched.”
“And you would not only sell supplies to women but help them with their stitching. You are so clever with your needle,” Aunt Catherine said. “Before long, you could have them doing embroidery and tatting, too—all with supplies they’ve purchased from you, of course.”
“But I’ve never run a shop before,” Mrs. Bonner said.
“You’d never gone west before, either, but you got here. Catherine and I would help you. Emmy Blue, too.” Ma looked at my stitches on Waxy’s quilt. “Perhaps not so much with sewing, but Emmy Blue could stock shelves and help with customers.”
“I have a little money that I got from selling some of the things in the wagon,” Mrs. Bonner said slowly.
“Then it’s all set,” Ma told her.
“But where would I set up shop? I haven’t seen a vacant store in all of Golden.”
Ma’s eyes twinkled. “You leave that to me.”
That night, we left Tommy with Aunt Catherine, and Ma and Pa and I went for a walk along Clear Creek. We didn’t have a well yet, so we had to haul the water we used. Each of us carried a pail. When we reached the creek, Ma sat down on a rock and looked up at the sky. “There are thousands of stars, maybe more than that, but the mountains get in the way,” she said.
“Do you like the mountains now?” Pa asked dipping a bucket i
nto the cold creek.
“They are comforting, especially at night. They are like having warm arms around me.” Ma sighed, then was silent for a moment, before she said, “I believe we have found an occupation for Lucy.” She talked slowly, as if she were choosing her words carefully. “She will open a shop that will sell yard goods and trims and findings. Women who have worn out their clothes traveling a thousand miles across the prairie will be anxious to make new ones. And they will want to go to quilting, too. There’s nothing that will make a cabin a home faster than bright quilts on the beds.”
Pa shrugged. “I don’t know much about such things.”
“We have checked around, the three of us”—she glanced at me—“the four of us, that is. There isn’t a woman who wouldn’t patronize such a shop. Of course, it will take a few months for the goods to arrive, so Lucy will have time to get everything ready.”
Pa stared at Clear Creek, which sent up white foam as it rushed over the rocks. In the moonlight, the foam looked like ice. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention as he dipped another pail into the water.
“There is just one problem,” Ma said.
Pa stopped, the pail only half filled.
“We need to find a place for Lucy’s store. We have looked all over Golden, and there isn’t a spot available. With the way Golden is booming, any store space is taken up the moment it is finished. I don’t know where in the world Lucy could open her shop.”
Pa turned to look at Ma then, his head cocked, waiting.
Ma smiled at him. “She wouldn’t need much space, Thomas, and you have room for several stores in that building.”
“But the space has all been promised. It will be much more profitable if we rent to a hardware store or a restaurant or a saloon.”
“A saloon!” Ma said. “Surely, you aren’t serious, Thomas.”
“I am. A saloon pays better than a bank. In fact, the space is already let. There’s nothing wrong with a well-run saloon. Where else would you expect men to go after a day’s work underground?” He added, “I doubt Lucy Bonner would want to be next door to such an establishment.”
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