Impatient With Desire (11 page)

T
his morning was the second time Elitha refused to wash and I said she must.

“What does it matter?” she said. “We’re like beasts in a cave.”

Betsey, this is a child with such a strong sense of aesthetics she retied ribbons on her baby sisters’ birthday presents. Even if we were canning jam or slopping the hogs, she insisted on wearing a fresh pinafore daily.

“Look at your father,” I said sharply. At the table, George, one arm useless, laboriously shaved with the other while Frances held up the mirror Grandmother gave me. “We’re not beasts in a cave, Elitha. Even if we have to force ourselves, we have to remember who we are and act that way. We have to act as if this is temporary, because it is.”

I gave her the speech I give myself frequently, and I said it loudly enough for Mrs. Wolfinger to hear.

Reluctantly Elitha got up and washed her face and hands, to my relief.

She is taller than I am. I could not have physically forced her to wash. I suppose it is a kind of blessing that hunger makes resistance harder. It is just too much effort. I’m glad of that but also regretful; it’s not in my children’s natures to mindlessly follow orders.

I marvel at George. He shaves
every single day
. My biggest battle is inertia. As it is, it’s hard for me to concentrate. Sometimes my hand shakes. I hope this is legible.

“T
ell me again what Illinois is like, Momma,” Frances asked this afternoon.

If I had looked at George, I think I would have burst into tears. I took a deep breath and kept my voice normal. “In spring, our farm in Illinois looked like a garden, remember? Fifty peach trees in bloom along with the cherry and the pear. Behind the farmhouse—remember?—we had a whole orchard of fruit trees with their clusters of flowers. The peach trees bloomed first, and when the wind blew their blossoms, you stood under the trees with your big sisters and caught handfuls. Aunt Elizabeth and I spent days canning peaches and pears for wintertime, and you helped. Then came my favorite, the apple trees in full flower. The apple blossoms were at their height the day in May your father and I married, the bees humming in the pink and white blossoms…”

Jean Baptiste, sitting at my feet, was enthralled, as were the children. For a moment, the dank shelter seemed to be filled with white apple blossoms sailing through the air, sailing—

“Why did we leave?” Frances asked.

The blossoms became snow dripping through the top where we’re taking the hides down. George and I looked at each other, then turned away.

W
e left, dear Frances, because I wanted to leave.

My reading group began Hastings’s book the very night James Reed brought it, and my eagerness to go overland, already keen, grew. After my group left, George and I talked at the kitchen table.

“It’s one thing to read about it,” George said. “I relish reading about it. But we can’t just pick up and go.”

“Why not?”

George laughed. “For one thing, I’m too old—”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not you.”

“Well, the children are too young—”

“Now which one is it, George? You’re too old or they’re too young? It’s not like it’s ’44 or ’45. There’s a trail to California, plain to be seen. Wagons have done it. We know what to expect.”

We continued the conversation around the clock, Betsey. There were genuine concerns about such a venture, and I had already thought long and hard about them.

Milking cows in the barn, George said, “We would leave a great deal behind. All my grown children and grandchildren—”

“They can come with us if they want. I would delight in their company, but they all seem content where they are.”

“You’re not?”

“You know I love it here, but it’s so…
settled.
California’s the last frontier, George. Don’t you want to see it, be part of it?”

When George couldn’t keep the hankering off his face, we both burst out laughing.

In the bedroom, dark except for one candle, in our nightclothes, he said, “Tamsen, I could never leave Jacob.”

“Of course not,” I said. “They’ll come with us. Jacob can live out his years in warmth and sunshine, and Elizabeth can find a thousand new things to cook. Imagine the opportunities for all our children, George, what their lives will be like. What
our
lives will be like!”

“All that free land,” George mused again the next night in the bedroom, and looked at me and grinned. “All you want just there for the taking—”

“I’ll start my school for girls!”

“In a few years, California will be like Illinois,” George said. “We’ll be in on it from the beginning!”

We embraced, George snuffed out the candle, and we fell back on the bed.

The next four months were a pleasure of preparation and anticipation, Betsey. In March, one month before departure, we had stopped at Elizabeth and Jacob’s to show them all the new parcels. One parcel had beautiful new boots for George, and of course he wanted to show Jacob right away.

In the barn, three wagons were in various stages of construction. Jacob’s stepsons, Solomon and William, and two teamsters, Samuel Shoemaker and James Smith, packed shiny farm implements. Jacob rested on a hay stack, his eyes closed.

George strode into the barn with a pack of smaller nephews. “See my new boots, Jacob. Aren’t they beauties?”

Jacob opened his eyes and gave a token nod.

George showed them to Solomon and William and to the teamsters, who whistled approval, then he picked up a sack of seed off a pile near Jacob. “You know, boys,” he said to his nephews, “in California you just throw the seed on the ground and reach down and pick the plant. What do you fancy to eat, Jacob?”

Jacob slowly shook his head. “I think I’m just gonna stay put.”

George’s face sobered, but his tone was still light. “All you can look forward to here is snow freezing your privates.”

Our nephews giggled. Jacob’s fleeting smile looked like a grimace. “I’m too old, my legs hurt, my back,” he whined. “My whole life I’ve had pain, George—”

In the doorway I held two blueberry pies Elizabeth had sent out and watched George listening to Jacob’s litany, watched him deflate with every ailment. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jacob,” I finally said, “you’ll live twenty more years in warmth and sunshine.”

Jacob lumbered to get up, groaning in an exaggerated way.

I knew George would not go without him. “If you don’t want to go for yourself, Jacob,” I said, “go for your children. Don’t rob them of this opportunity.”

Chagrined, Jacob looked at his boys’ pleading faces. He looked at George. “You really think I could do it?”

“All you need is a little open country,” George said. He reached out a hand and pulled Jacob up. “It’ll be just like the old days, brother.”

George turned to me tonight and said, “I knew he didn’t want to go. I talked him into it, because otherwise I couldn’t have come.”

“You didn’t act alone,” I said.

“What luck?” the rower shouted to the ship, and we waited, breaths held, until the answer came.

“We had bad luck,” Jean Baptiste says frequently.

I’ve thought often about luck here. We always assign a value to luck, think it either good or bad. Looked at that way, he’s right. Luck was against us.

But you also can retrace our steps, as I have done many nights, and see that many small decisions, made thoughtfully or without thought, carried us incrementally, inexorably, here. You could say, though I’m not ready to, that we caused our own fate.

Tully stands at the window with Thomas on his shoulders and spreads his arms wide. “See your farm, Thomas,” he says. At this time of day, the light is golden, and I know he looks at a delightful sight. “And your mother is eager to go to Ohio,” Tully says incredulously. He turns around to where I’m writing you at the table. “Tell your sister that no one in her right mind would ever leave such abundance. Carolina has every delight anyone could want.”

Carolina
was
a beautiful place, Betsey, and I was very happy there. Our farm and my school prospered, and I was quite the entrepreneur, selling our milk and eggs at the door, honey from our bees, and my special molded butter. I know you have many wonders in Newburyport, but I rather think you don’t have butter designs. In the evenings, I took the butter from the cold water crocks in our storehouse and laid out my tools: a circular wooden board Tully had fashioned for me, a set of sharply pointed sticks, a knife, and squares of muslin. While Tully rocked Thomas to sleep and we talked quietly by candlelight, I molded designs on the butters: flowers, a bird, whatever took my fancy, once even an elephant, squeezing a lump of butter through the muslin for its rough skin, a different muslin mesh for its tail, and my knife blade for its tusks. I did not charge extra for the designs because molding gave me pleasure, but I couldn’t make enough butter to keep up with the demand.

Yet, every time I bid one of our Ohio-bound neighbors farewell, desire leapt in me. All my life, I have wondered about the place I’m not in. You either are that way or you aren’t, and you can’t imagine the opposite state.

Tully wasn’t that way—though we had determined to remove to some western state the next year because of his precarious health and our strong dislike to slavery—and there were times I found it hard to want something and have to wait for someone else to want it too. George was, though he thought he had grown too old.

I will own the truth. I wanted George and the children to go to California because I couldn’t go without them. But I wanted them to go for themselves too. It cannot be wrong to wish as much for others as you wish for yourself. Certainly it can’t be wrong to wish things for yourself.

I would give anything to take upon myself the pain my children now endure. It is nearly intolerable to consider that I may be responsible for that pain.

M
y menses have stopped. I thought it was the change of life, but this morning Elitha told me hers have stopped too. In one way I’m glad, because it’s easier, but it worries me too. What else is shutting down in our bodies?

The darkness has bothered me the most. It can be high noon outside, but here, underground, it’s always dark. We read and write and eat and live by lighted pinecones when Jean Baptiste can find them in the snow and the omnipresent firelight, which casts its eerie shadows in the corners. I tell myself, Betsey, that this is just like when I was little and we ate by firelight and candlelight because the whale oil was too precious to use, but it’s not like that at all because I didn’t know anything different then. When the snow melts more, Jean Baptiste and I hope to uncover one of our wagons to find kerosene lamps, and my sewing box for Elitha to bring back her interest, which has flagged again now that the tobacco is gone.

Solomon came over today. With a hat shading his eyes, he was able to tolerate the bright light. He seems his old self, and his visit cheered up everyone. Jean Baptiste asked me if he could come back home, and I said yes.

“T
he third wagon has all the things we won’t need until California,” Frances says, parroting my voice.

Enormously excited, she, Georgia, and Eliza, in linsey traveling dresses, peep out the window at the three pristine covered wagons in our farmyard.

“The second has our food, our clothes, all the necessities of camp life.”

They squeal and jump up and down, watching oxen, horses, dogs, their father, and the teamsters engage in tremendous activity. Next to the children, an 1846 feed store calendar left on the wall has a date circled in red: April 15.

“And the first wagon,” Frances tells her sisters, “is our family home on wheels!”

We dismantled the first wagon and parts of the other two for the shelter, platforms, table, benches, and a small “cupboard” near the fireplace we kept the food in until it was gone.

The remnants of the second and third wagons are encased in snow that thaws and freezes, but this afternoon, Jean Baptiste tunneled like a madman and reached one.

“Tamsen,” George yelled from his platform. “The seed!”

I turned around wearily.

“Don’t you remember?” he said, already struggling to get up. “In California you just throw the seed on the ground, boys. What do you fancy to eat, Jacob?”

George in between us, Jean Baptiste and I stumbled across the clearing until George said, “Here. We’re close, I know we’re close.”

Jean Baptiste thrust a pole into the ground. It struck something. He looked at George.

“Keep going! Keep going!”

Jean Baptiste shoveled, then clawed at the snow with his bare hands until he uncovered wood. He smiled hugely at us, almost crazily I thought, until I realized later that our smiles back mirrored his.

Jean Baptiste wriggled down the tunnel he’d made. George and I looked at each other, holding our breath.

Jean Baptiste emerged, exultant, holding a bag of seed.

Even with one arm, George easily tore open the soggy bag. His face immediately fell. He stared at the black, withered seed, shaking his head in disbelief and disappointment.

Inside the children gathered round me at the fireplace as I ferociously stirred the contents of the pot as if I could will it into something they could eat. George touched my shoulder.

“It’s blighted, Tamsen. You can’t salvage it.”

I stared at the fetid, black, oozing liquid, which was clearly inedible.

“Can you fix it, Mother?” Frances asked.