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He didn’t preach that evening. Instead a bit of the former man appeared, smiling, patting children on their heads, laughing out loud at Mr. Blakely’s joke. Rachel beamed. I think she took credit for his transformation—and he did look upon her with affectionate eyes. My stomach gnawed as I watched them, wanted to say something. I chose to eat a pastry Nancy had made instead. We sang carols, the room warmed by the fire and friends. When the children opened their meager presents that Mr. Warren and the other guard handed out from beneath the tree, I caught Mr. Warren’s gaze. He wiggled his eyebrows, grinned, then tended back to his task.

Yes, Christmas would be a lovely time to marry.

After the church service while men and women chatted in the cool rain before stepping into their buggies and wagons, Mr. Warren pulled me behind the log building. A steady rain misted and we ducked under an umbrella Rachel had brought with her that I raised.

“You can push it onto a belt,” he suggested, “and wear it when we’re riding, to put precious things into.” He’d gifted me with a small leather pocket purse with my initials worked into it.

“I don’t wear belts. You just began wearing one yourself.”

“I’ll make you one.”

“I didn’t make you anything.” I should have thought of something for him. I wondered at my lack of generosity, but Mr. Warren interrupted my shame.

“You’ll still marry me next year. That’s your present to me.”

“If you have my father baptize you, yes.”

He kissed me then and would have done so again, but my father shouted my name and I slipped away into the night, shaking the rain from the umbrella. I couldn’t show his leather gift to anyone except Nancy, but I treasured it. That night, I put my mother’s golden wedding ring inside.

The winter had its way with us, sending rain in shapes: drizzle, downpour, fog, and once or twice a freeze. We even woke one morning to snow, a rarity. Rivers rose, and yet that spring of 1854 I traveled with Father south to start a church at Spencer Butte not far from Eugene City where he’d also worked to begin a Presbyterian church. We rode through spring drizzle to Grand Prairie where Father preached and then on to Albany where he began a Congregational church. Both were closer villages, but still it meant much riding and no time to mix with Mr. Warren. It wasn’t like the old times, when my father and I had ridden and he taught Scripture along the way, spoke of the high hills that placed their arms around us all at Lapwai, breathed in the hot, dry air. Here, moisture was our companion, low fogs in the morning, high streams we crossed with trepidation. And a man obsessed. He talked incessantly of Lapwai, of getting the Mission Board to approve his and Rachel’s return. Ours, too, I imagined, if I still lived with him.

“Why go back there?” I gave my horse her rein, so she stopped and tore at grass.

“Lapwai? Why, it’s my life. Your mother’s life. We did such good work there, Eliza. Such good work. The People need me.”

“They betrayed us.”

“What? What a thing to say! They saved our lives, your moth
er’s and mine and your sisters and brother. It wasn’t Timothy’s fault he couldn’t rescue you and the others. Don’t even think such a thing.”

But I did.

I changed the subject. “You often left Mama behind in Lapwai.” I kept judgment from my voice.

“She did fine. She had Matilda. We did the Lord’s work there, Eliza. Just as we do here, bringing the Lord to people to light up their darkness. Someone always has to remain behind.”

I trusted we were doing the Lord’s work when I traveled with him as a child. I wasn’t sure we still were. I believe he took me with him because I could sing all the hymns and he knew that our hearts are turned through music. But it concerned me that my mother had remained behind so often with no one but Nez Perce to look after her, her husband far away in case of trouble. She must have felt abandoned. I knew I would.

The hills in this Willamette Valley were all referred to as buttes and grew out of the lush, flat landscape like those blemishes that appeared on my chin or forehead during my monthlies. We dismounted to give our legs a stretch and relieve the horses too. “So you think one day I’ll marry?” I posed the question to my father as we watered our horses at a small stream not far from Spencer Butte. “I’ll have a husband to look after as Mama looked after you.”

“Marry? Well. One day. But you’re just sixteen, Eliza. A girl. You have much promise before you, and thankfully, there are no young men panting at my door for your hand. That’s all I’d need.” He grumbled that last under his breath, but I heard it. “One day you’ll go to the Tualatin Academy, and when you do, you might meet a young man worthy of you. I see none in Brownsville. There were no mates for me here either. A friend found Rachel for me.”

Something you ought not to have done.
I picked at the horse’s rein. “There are some young men of interest.” The horses tugged at new grass. We’d have to be careful or they’d collick with the tender shoots. My Nellie twisted her head to nip at a fly, jangling the bit.

“We’d best be riding.” He helped me mount Nellie sidesaddle, then eased himself onto his bigger gelding.

“There is Mr. Warren, of Missouri. He came to classes for a time.”

“Warren?” My father jerked his head around to look at me, his hand resting on the rump of his horse. He scowled. “He’s a drunk. I thought you’d followed my orders about not seeing him. You have, haven’t you?”

“Why do you say he’s a drunk?”

“Everyone says it.” He turned back, shouted over his shoulder. “God will find the man for you in due time. Don’t you worry.”

His certainty of Mr. Warren’s fallen nature caused my face to burn hot. But I’d already imagined the worst, so I knew it couldn’t happen. I just had to find a way to make my father accept what God had already ordained.

“Andrew! You frightened me.” He’d entered the cold smokehouse and stood behind me so when I turned I stared into his face and gasped. I struck his chest. “Don’t ever do that, don’t surprise me like that.” Wiping an errant hair from the bun at my neck, I stepped back.

“Got you to call me Andrew ’stead of Mr. Warren.”

“Mr. Warren is proper. My mother never used my father’s Christian name, and you, well, for you, Mr. Warren is fitting.” I gathered my skirts and knitted shawl to slip around him. I
didn’t like him just showing up, pressing his luck against my father seeing us. Our breaths were puffs of white against the crisp air. Lately we’d agreed to meet away from here, when my father was at the post office.

“As it happens, I haven’t come to see you.” He grabbed my elbow, gentle but with purpose. He leaned in to kiss me and I let him. “I’ve come to see your pa about that baptism. Need to get that out of the way if we’re to wed when you turn seventeen. You haven’t changed your mind.”

“I haven’t. Neither have I told my father.” I paused. “Are you really going to ask for a baptism?”

“I am.”

The horses stomped in their stalls. I could hear the crunch of their teeth grinding at the rye grass in their mangers. “I wonder if going forward on Sunday might be . . . better.” My father wouldn’t refuse him then. Who knew how he’d respond to a “drunk” with the two of them alone. I’m not sure why I thought my father would deny anyone, but Mr. Warren might be different in his eyes as I’d mentioned him again.

“In front of everyone? Naw. I’ll have enough to stand for on Saturday nights with my card partners teasing that I must have done something religious to get you to marry me at last.”

It was the first time I realized that cards might be a part of his thinking after we married, after he chose the faith.

“You won’t be seeking such things once you have the spirit of the Lord inside you. He meets all needs.”

Mr. Warren put his arm around my waist, pulled me to him. “Not all a man’s needs. Even your father has a second wife with spit and fire to her and surely there’s no finer man of God than him.”

I hadn’t thought about my father’s “needs” in that way nor that Rachel had both spit and fire. She was comely and
the harsher life here had required taking in and hemming her dresses. But my father had married Rachel to take care of us. He had married her the very day she’d stepped off the ship in Vancouver, took her to Forest Grove, then spent the night somewhere. He brought her home already his wife so there’d be no “talk” of impropriety. No, he married her for us and it was his bad fortune that she had so few abilities to care for herself, let alone four children. But then why did he keep her? It was a question I would ponder later, after I convinced Mr. Warren to wait. I needed more weeks to prepare my father.

In May, I overheard Mr. Blakely ask my father my question at Brown and Blakely’s store. I stood as in a pool of still water between the aisles of crockery and tin candleholders, certain that the men weren’t aware that I was there. A slender Kalapuya Indian man carried fish in to Mr. Blakely, and after he left Mr. Blakely asked my father, “Can you make things work, then, Reverend?”

I wasn’t sure at first what they talked of.

“Rachel’s a good woman.”

So Rachel’s lack of domestic skills was food for gossipy tongues. She was so unbeguiling, expressing her lacks through comments about how strange it is that “bluing turns sheets white” or wondering aloud “why people sing songs to the butter churn.” She didn’t know that the chant tells the churner when the dasher should go up or down. No one wished her ill will, but Mr. Blakely’s question while my father sorted mail was one I had asked of myself.

“Can I make things work?” My father repeated his friend’s question, the
shif-shif
of letters being posted a backdrop to my beating heart. “I have to make things work. That’s what mar
riage vows mean. I made my bed, now I’m meant to sleep in it. Even if Rachel has no knowledge of how to clean the cords or pluck ducks for feathers or even sew the tick up.”

Mr. Blakely laughed. “Well, I imagine she warms that bed good.”

My father coughed. “She’s learning domestic skills. Eliza’s teaching her. It’s good training for Eliza’s own house one day. I once thought I’d send Eliza for more schooling. Her mother wanted that. To go back East or back to Tualatin Academy. But Rachel’s not ready yet to handle what needs doing. Oh, I can leave her alone enough to take Eliza with me to start that new church south of here. Not sure when Rachel will be ready for that. Travel’s hard on her. So—” He must have leaned across the counter as his voice got louder and I heard the slap of a post. “Can’t let Eliza go until there’s someone to take over, and until then, I can make it work.”

“Makes sense.”

Neither man spoke after that, each returned to his labor. Birds chirped and I heard the swooshing sound of Mr. Blakely winding string onto the roll he’d later use to wrap paper around the dry goods bought by the women of Brownsville. It was 1854, spring. My mother’d been gone three and one-half years.

It came to me that what my father wanted in this second marriage was someone to care for his children, not a workmate as my mother had been, not a companion. He had me for that. He wanted a mother for us, a noble cause. But when he saw his new wife couldn’t be that, he was willing to sacrifice my future education, my mother’s dream for me, willing to say to himself it was fine to keep me home until his children were raised, to keep my life as his companion in the work. There’d be no path for him to give his consent to marriage for me, not to Mr. Warren or any young man. Not until Millie and Martha Jane
were old enough to be married and on their own and that was ten years away, at least. Millie, the youngest, was only seven.