On Her Way Home

On Her Way Home

A Novel

Sara Petersen

Copyright 2014 by Sara Petersen

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Sara Petersen

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First printing: May 2014

ISBN
-13:  978-1499330595

To Jeff, the person who knows me best, and who with patience submitted to nightly chapter tests issued by a sensitive and somewhat obsessive wife. I love you.

And to my children:

Caleb, Travis, Martie, and Kayli—my perfect set,

Whose inspiring and humbling words might reasonably be the only ones within this book that hold any merit...

“Mom, even when you're not very good at something,

it's still fun to do it.”

Chapter One

Minot, North Dakota

May 1923

The heat penetrated into her black shoes from the grayed boards nailed one in front of the other down the length of the train depot. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Jo felt the dust gathering between each of her toes. She purposely curled and uncurled them inside of her hot shoes, trying to get the grit to shift to the bottom of her hose and leave her be. It was no use, not in this heat. Winter had thawed, the air had turned warm and sweet with the smell of spring, and then in the space of a day it was gone, driven out by the rays of the new spring sun.

Two weeks past, she sat comfortably on the bench at the train station while the sun spread its soft beam upon her shoulders. Now, riding in on the wind, the heat sucked the moisture from air and earth along the railroad tracks heading west. She sighed, the dust clinging to her sweat-dampened toes and irritating her to no end. Another gust blew up from the south sending a flurry of dry earth soaring into the sky and whipping the papers pinned to the depot wall. One crisp paper broke free and weaved its way through the crowd until it caught itself under the toe of Jo’s shoe. She bent down to pick it up, frustrated by the dust caking her shoe buckle as it fought its way into the sandpit that was her stocking. The yellowed paper crackled as she held it firmly between her fingers and tried to read it in the breeze.

“The Carousel Club. Dance Hall girls wanted. $15.00 per week plus tips.”

She crumpled the ad into a ball with her fist before letting it drop to the ground and find its new home on the prairie.
Dance Hall girl, ha…not likely
, Jo thought to herself. For one thing she was just barely over five feet tall, not exactly long-limbed, and secondly, the limbs she did possess weren’t exactly pleasing. They had shape all right, but it was more for practical use with strong, solid muscles. The corners of her mouth turned up in a light smile as she remembered her father’s description of her, “She is a sturdy sort; if you feel your feet coming off the ground in a strong wind, grab hold to her. She’s not goin’ anywhere.” Not exactly a compliment to most women, but Jo didn’t mind the words coming from her father.

She was 12 years old, sitting in the cool shade with her back against the barn when she’d overheard him say those exact words to her oldest brother. The day before, she was taking lunch to her pa along the edge of the farm field where he was clearing more acreage. The logs he cleared were stacked on a slight downhill with two huge wooden posts stuck in the ground below them and two posts above them, with a rope tied tightly between each one. Bucksaw, their strong farm horse, was tethered to a tree about 25 yards down the hill, munching away on grass. Pa had just sat down and pressed the water dipper to his lips when a hiss broke the air and the rope snaked through the blue sky. At the same time, a loud cracking came from the log pile as the top left post splintered into pieces and shot over the pile. The mass of logs shifted and crunched into the bottom posts, pushing them upright.

When Jo turned wide eyes on Pa, he was already down the hill frantically trying to untether Bucksaw, who had wound himself tightly around the tree when the rope went hissing through the air. She looked back at the log pile, the bottom posts bearing all the weight and the rope on the right side so taut it began cutting into the post. Scampering up the hill to the pile, she plopped on the grass behind the remaining top post, dug her heels in the ground, wrapped her arms around the post, and pulled back with all her might. Feeling the weight drag her forward, she pulled even harder, squinting her eyes shut with the effort. Jo was terrified, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the logs broke free and pounded down the hill into Bucksaw, and now Pa. She pulled tighter as the post bit into her shoulder and her arms started to shake. She could hear Pa hollering at Bucksaw but couldn’t make out what he was saying. She felt the dirt and grass move under the heels of her boots as her legs began to slip from their hold. She clenched, but it was no use. With a sudden wrenching, the rope snapped, and the post violently shot from her arms, dragging her forward with its momentum.

Face first in the churned-up soil, she jerked upright brushing her hair out of her eyes so she could search for Pa. The massive logs rolled on top of each other faster and faster down the slope where they crashed into trees or wedged themselves in between rocks. The roar was deafening until finally the remaining logs lulled to a stop in the small pebbles of the shallow stream below. All was quiet, apart from her desperate breaths forced in and out while searching for Pa. When she finally caught sight of him, he was dashing up the hill from a stand of dense trees to the left, eyes strained and worried. He pulled her from the grass, sat her in his lap and held her as they stared at the tangled mass of wood and earth below. Nothing was said between them. The lunch Jo had carried out to Pa was still sitting calmly in the grass, unaware of the tumultuous moments before.

She remembered Pa getting up, dusting off the back of his overalls, picking the lunch pail off the ground, and taking a huge bite of the thick-sliced ham followed by a hearty chunk of wheat bread smothered in strawberry jam. He looked back at her with a little bit of red jam dribbling down the side of his mouth and said with a twinkle in his green eyes, “Tastes good. It would have been a shame to die and let it go to waste.”

It was too close a call for Jo, still too shaky to fully enjoy his joke with him, so she said nothing, but let out a huge breath and smiled up into his face. They enjoyed every last bite of lunch together, and then Jo picked up the pail and headed back across the field toward home, while Pa sauntered down the hill with Bucksaw to start the cleanup.

Neither of them had ever mentioned the incident to anyone else, and Jo felt like they shared a special secret. Every once in a while, when a crisis happened or there was a close call on the farm after that, Pa would blow out his breath and say, “Whoo, I sure could use a bite of bread with strawberry jam right now.” Everyone would look at him puzzled, everyone except Jo.

Sitting with her back to the barn that day, she pondered on that moment, the proudest moment of her young life. It was rare for him to dish out approval, so much that when he did, she knew it was authentic. Jo had tried to live up to the praise ever since. That’s why it was best to move on right now. She didn’t want others to see that sometimes even the wind was too much for her.

Jo watched the crumpled piece of paper scuttle along like a dust devil in the prairie before turning her gaze to the other wind-whipped advertisements pinned to the red brick wall. She carefully nudged her way through a cluster of flamboyant women and dapper young men gathered in a tight circle in the middle of the walk, laughing and airing their weekend exploits in a loud brassy manner despite the crowd of listening ears around them. One headline in particular caught her eye.

“Four arrested and fined. PROHIBITION STRICTLY ENFORCED.”

A week ago, Jo’s train had traveled through Chicago, and the newspapers at the Depot Station had been riddled with prohibition articles. She’d noticed the same trend in nearly every large city she’d stopped in. Pushing the bold headlines from her mind, Jo quickly browsed the remaining papers pinned to the board. Some were newspaper stories from back east, some were advertisements for shaving cream and electric toasters, and some were ads for other unsavory jobs. It depressed her to think that some young girl like herself had most likely come along here, seen the same Dance Hall ad, and found just the thing she was looking for.
Dance Hall girl, pfft, completely not suited for me. I’d kick someone in the face or melt in a puddle of shame.
Jo felt a quick jab of pain as she remembered that her particular figure wouldn’t even qualify her for the position. Nothing about Jo resembled the willowy beauties plastered on movie posters, with their long legs and flat chests shrouded in slinky silk dresses. She was a schoolmarm. That was her shape.

The loud cry of the train whistle roused Jo from her reverie, and she took a step toward it. To her left she heard a muttered, “Pardon me,” and quickly paused to let the hurried depot clerk push past her to the pin board. He pulled a bright white paper from his pocket with dark typing on it and tacked it to the wall with a single thump of his hammer. She hastily read through the list of classifieds as the train whistle shrilled in her ears again.

Wanted: Ranch Hand. Room & Board. $15.00/week. Montana.

The train whistle blew loud and long. Without thinking, Jo reached up and snatched the post off the wall, then hurried to the train.

Chapter Two

Jo had been traveling two weeks now and was accustomed to the noise, smell, and feel of the locomotive. What she hadn’t grown accustomed to was the kaleidoscope of nature ever changing through her tiny sleeper car window. It zipped along like the flap book she had confiscated from one of her naughtier students, but instead of scandalous drawings it was wooded forests, slow wide rivers, and sprawling plains. Her window acted as the frame for fantastical landscape paintings. She’d spent last school session teaching her young pupils the song “America,” and now she was truly experiencing the “spacious skies and amber waves of grain” as she traveled in the railcar further west.

Train passage was hypnotic to Jo. As her heart beat along with the clackety-clack of the gaps between the railway tracks, she once again commended herself for hoarding every penny and forgoing many of the trinkets that had tempted her this past year whilst saving for her journey. Jo could think of only one frivolous item with regret: the blue silk dress she’d admired in the department store window last Christmas. The color would have set her eyes off perfectly. A school crush had said her “eyes were the shade of bluebells” and had called her bonita, a Spanish word he’d picked up from an immigrant pupil. It was Jo’s one and only vanity. She did think her eyes were rather pretty and was grateful she didn’t have to wear insipid spectacles like so many other schoolteachers. She was short, freckled, and “sturdy", all of which she could forgive on account of her remarkable eyes. They were the perfect distance apart with a well formed nose in the middle and a smattering of light freckles sweeping across the bridge. Her face was oval, and she had thin flat eyebrows just a shade darker than her deep caramel-colored hair.

Most women of the day thought hair shouldn’t have excessive life to it, keeping their hair meticulously curled and pinned, but Jo’s hair had a mind of its own. Usually, it was wispy and playful, winding across her face and flirting with her neck, but with today’s sultry heat it pulled on the back of her scalp in a heavy and oppressive bun. On a class picnic last fall, little Marta asked Jo to play hoops, a game where you roll a hoop and run alongside of it and beat it with a stick to keep it going. After several rounds of hoops, it was hard to tell which person was the child and which was the teacher as their hair bounced around their faces and fell over their eyes. When Jo had finally gotten a look at herself in the mirror at the end of the day, she laughed out loud. She was the spitting image of six-year-old Miss Marta with her flushed cheeks and unruly hair.

Jo sank back in her seat as she watched the scenery go by. Two weeks and she still didn’t have a concrete plan beyond heading west and finding new purpose. It wasn’t that she was unhappy exactly. She was grateful for her blessings, for her family, for the long contented days of her childhood, but in the last two years she’d felt a stirring. At first it had been a quiet musing,
what does life hold for me?
When she ignored the musing, it came scampering in as a more forceful,
what do I want to do with my life?
She answered the stirring by accepting a teaching position and cheerily setting forth with a new cause—nurturing and loving her students with fervor. The children flourished from the attention of their dutiful teacher, but Jo wondered sometimes if she had anything to do with their growth. She felt they would thrive in any circumstances, most of them enveloped in warm, comfortable homes with devoted families. Their small Illinois town had weathered better than most during the war and the subsequent boom and financial hardships that followed. As time passed, Jo grew accustom to her new identity as a schoolteacher, but her musing and wonderings would not be silenced.

It was a winter morning, and Jo had dressed quietly and crept out of the house, planning to get to the schoolhouse early and build the fire to welcome the chilled students. The heavy darkness and quiet winter weight encircled her as she strode along the road to the modest brick building. Her boots knew the path well and as she came to the little structure, she briskly went up the two steps, reached out for the doorknob and crossed into the cold, still, classroom. When it was almost time to ring the bell, she could hear the rowdy laughter of kids throwing and dodging snowballs in the yard. She sat in her chair and thought over the morning; that was when the fear came bursting in. Turning to blow out her lantern as the dawning light came filtering in through the windows, Jo found no lantern awaiting her extinguishing breath of air. She quickly recalled her morning routine: waking up, dressing, packing her lunch pail, walking to the school, up the steps, opening the door, finding the wood, and lighting the stove, all of which she had done in complete winter darkness. The thought terrified her. Surely, she had lit the lantern and used it to light her way. It was impossible that she had completed her morning routine in utter blackness. Her father had installed electric lights at home five years ago, but Jo resisted turning the bulbs on in the early morning hours, choosing to use her lantern instead.

The noisy kids came bustling into the classroom, dripping wet snow all over the hardwood floor and calling through chattering teeth, “Good Morning, Miss Swenson.” Jo greeted them with feigned cheerfulness and went about her instruction that day in a stunned stupor, distracted by her thoughts and fears. Finally, at the close of the day, after the last pupil had slammed the door behind him, Jo threw her arms across her desk and wept
. Impossible
, she thought to herself, impossible that at age twenty-one her life was so monotonous, so habitual that she could live it in the dark. She envisioned a stooped old woman plodding along the path to the school building. Good Morning, Miss Swenson.
Miss Swenson
. Jo was afraid. Afraid for the first time in her young life that she wasn’t living the life she was meant to. She ached for something that was her own. She thought of her bluebell-colored, spectacle-free eyes and scoffed, “I could live this life blind; it is so familiar to me.” Jo gave in to the pity party she was throwing herself, cried for another hour, then walked home in the dark, icy evening.