Prairie Widow (6 page)

After dinner, with Peter and Emma amusing themselves in the comer with their toys, the three women arranged themselves in a circle, sitting on the high-backed chairs. Lucy had removed some knitting from her satchel. She began to knit energetically while Jennifer and Nancy sipped ginger tea. The three chatted, telling each other about their homes back east. A tear came to Jennifer's eye when she spoke, and Nancy, likewise, seemed saddened when it was her turn. Only Lucy seemed to have no regrets about leaving the east.

By and by, everyone grew sleepy and went to bed. Jennifer slept near her husband. Lucy and Nancy slept on the children's mattress. And the children slept on thick blankets laid out on the dirt floor. As Jennifer gazed up into the blackness, she found herself strangely lulled by the constant shivering of her husband, and she fell asleep.

The next morning, Walter was paler and weaker than ever. It frightened Jennifer when she saw his face. Lucy also noticed, and she shooed Jennifer away so that she could resume her doctoring.

When Nancy Camp saw Walter, she went to a comer, faced it, clasped a Bible she had brought, and she looked toward the pole rafters. “Lord, God…” she began to whisper.

Jennifer couldn't stand what was happening. She burst from her dugout. She ran to the well, whose sides were built up of prairie sod, and there she collapsed near the bucket and began to sob. Then she, too, began to whisper, “Please, God.

But when Jennifer next looked toward the dugout, she saw, through tear-filled eyes, the somber figure of Lucy Baker standing within the doorway.

“No, no. Go back in,” choked Jennifer.

But Lucy did not go back in. Followed closely by a sniffling Nancy Camp, who held her Bible in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, Lucy proceeded solemnly toward Jennifer.

There was no preacher in Four Corners, so Seth Baker, at his wife's behest, improvised the words over Walter Vandermeer's grave, “Father, who art in heaven, um, hallowed be thy name, accept unto your bosom our friend, Walter Vandermeer…”

Twenty or so neighbors had come to the burial on Grave's Hill, which was really nothing more than a slight rise in the land, and they clustered in a spot freshly scythed around the rectangular pit. They listened patiently to Seth's words, which were competing with a warm, gentle wind.

“Walter had not been among us long before he was taken away, but, ah, he was a good man…”

Though they hadn't known Walter very well, a few of the women were crying. Some of the younger children hung restlessly onto their mothers, while a couple of men anxiously rotated their broad-brimmed hats in their hands or bit their lips nervously, anxious to get back to their fields. Nancy Camp stood alongside her husband, a tall, wiry man whose Adam's apple slid up and down as he and his wife read from their Bible, moving their lips silently. Every so often, Nancy dabbed a tear from her cheek with a handkerchief.

Jennifer, meanwhile, in a dark cotton dress, propped herself against the short, upright post that was Lucy Baker, who had also gathered to her side Peter and Emma. Her own three children stood opposite her across the grave.

“… We do not always pretend to understand your ways, O Lord, but we accept them as wise.”

At one point, above Seth's voice and the wind, could be heard the whistle of a meadowlark, which was perched several yards away on a tilted headstone, seemingly enjoying the warm summer day. Then, in a yellow burst, the bird flew down the little, partly shaven hill and skimmed across the grass tops.

“… We beseech you to take kindly to Walter's wife, Jennifer, and his two children, Peter and Emma, and that you, um, show mercy, amen.”

And everyone repeated, “Amen.”

At that, two neighbors—middle-aged brothers who shared a homestead—stepped forward and began to shovel dirt into the hole, covering Walter Vandermeer, who was wrapped in canvass only, wood being too scarce and too precious to use for coffins. Behind the two brothers, waiting to be put in place, lay a headstone from Franz Hoffmann's store, its inscription facing the sky.

Lucy Baker gave Jennifer a stoic hug around the shoulder with one arm.

“I hate to leave him here,” said Jennifer weakly. “He ought to be home.”

“He is home,” assured Lucy. “Look eastward. This ground is one with Ohio.”

The other neighbors approached Jennifer, mostly a couple at a time, to say how sorry they were and to hold her hands in theirs. Then, on the way to their wagons, some of them stopped by other graves to pay respects to loved ones, and cut back any grasses that had sprouted around the marker. It was only in this desultory manner that the cemetery was kept up, and there was a comer or two that had been rein-vaded by the prairie grasses, which swallowed up entire headstones.

With most of the neighbors now dispersing back across the prairie, Lucy said to Jennifer, “You come home with Seth and me.” She still gripped Jennifer's children, both of whom stared glassy-eyed at the slowly filling hole. “I've already told everyone you'll be there tonight, should they wish to pay their respects.”

“Thank you,” said Jennifer, watching her children. “But, you know, I think I'd like to be alone—for just a while.”

“Of course. But let me take Peter and Emma along with me. You'll join us later.”

Lucy began to escort the two away, but Emma stopped and looked back at her mother. She began to cry, and Jennifer dashed over, crouching and drawing Emma close. Peter tried to hold back tears, but then he, too, began to cry, and Jennifer pulled him close so that the three were in each other's arms.

Lucy turned to Seth. “Put ours in the wagon,” she said softly. “I'll be with you in a moment.”

Seth nodded and herded his own three children into the back of his wagon.

“Shh, shhh,” whispered Jennifer in her children's ears.

“I want Poppa,” choked Emma.

“I know,” said Jennifer.

“I wish we never left home,” said Peter.

“But we did,” said Jennifer, rising to her feet, angry with Walter again. She pressed her children toward Lucy, who reached out to take them. “Go with Mrs. Baker,” said Jennifer.

“Why aren't you coming?” peeped Emma, wiping her tears.

“I will.”

Lucy took Peter and Emma to her wagon, and they climbed onto the back with the Baker children. Then Lucy climbed onto the seat next to her husband. “You remember the way to my place?” called Lucy as Seth flicked the reins, starting up his black mare.

“I remember,” answered Jennifer, returning her gaze to her husband's grave. The hole was finally filled, and the headstone was in place. It read:

Here Lies
Walter Vandermeer
Beloved Husband
and Father
at Peace
in God's Embrace
1834-1873

Shovels in hand, the two brothers walked over to Jennifer. “The Lord wanted 'im,” was all the older one mumbled, not so much as looking at Jennifer as he walked past. The other seemed to want to offer his own condolences, but he only lowered his eyes and continued on to the buckboard, which was drawn by two mules.

The brothers' wagon was the last to rattle down the shallow hill, and Jennifer was left standing alone among the sprinkling of headstones and mingling grasses. The meadowlark was back and caught Jennifer's attention, perched as it was on a tiny cross, one of two tiny crosses set side-by-side. Jennifer noted the inscriptions. Both were Baker children, neither of whom had survived infancy. Then the meadowlark flitted over to another headstone, this one belonging to a Herman Whittaker. Then the bird flitted to yet another, as if it were showing Jennifer all the people who once lived on this prairie.

“Oh, Walter,” whispered Jennifer, barely hearing herself above the wind. “Do you see what you've done? Do you see where you've left your wife and children?” Jennifer dropped to her knees. She brushed her hand over the dark loamy soil that covered her husband. She felt her throat tighten. She didn't care what Lucy said. This was a strange land, and she couldn't bear the thought of leaving Walter buried in it while she and the children returned to her clapboard house and her own Poppa.

Jennifer's eyes glazed over as she wondered what her father, a widower, was doing that very moment. She looked at the sky. The sun was low. It was past the dinner hour, later back in Ohio. Her father was probably sitting in his heavy, cushioned chair and reading the Gazette. It had been his ritual for as long as Jennifer could remember. All through her childhood, each evening, he retired to the parlor and his chair to read while she, his only child, cleared the kitchen table and washed the dishes. Afterward, she would join him in the parlor and listen to him gripe about something in the paper—in those days, the Southern secessionists—while she would sit in her mother's rocker and read a book or do her needlepoint. Sometimes, her father would look up from his paper to comment on something he had just read, and she and he would discuss it though, really, Jennifer mostly listened.

That's the way it had been for so very long, and though she had fancied that she'd like to marry one day—and had spent a good deal of time imagining what the man would be like—Jennifer remained quite content to be the little housewife to her father, even as she turned nineteen, an age when a young lady ought to be married, as, indeed, all her childhood friends were.

But Jennifer's father was not so content. He complained to Jennifer often about her withdrawn ways, and every time he discovered an eligible bachelor—like the coalman or a fellow town clerk—he'd point him out to Jennifer and say, “Now, he would make a fine son-in-law!” But, to his never-ending frustration, either Jennifer proved to be too shy, or the young men had eyes for someone else, someone, perhaps, more fun.

Eventually, Jennifer's father grew so annoyed at his daughter's complacency that he took matters into his own hands. One evening, he arrived home after work with a dinner guest: a big, ruddy-faced man with blonde hair and blue eyes—someone, as Jennifer judged it, about ten years her senior.

“Jenny, I would like you to meet Mr. Walter Vandermeer,” her father said, tottering at the doorway, for he almost always made a stop at O'Reilly's Tavern on his way home. “…a fine, upstanding citizen, and a Dutchman to boot.”

“Miss Schuyler, it is my great pleasure to meet with you,” said Walter, himself a mite unsteady on his feet, for it was at O'Reilly's the two men had met. “Your father has told me so much about you.”

Jennifer remembered that meeting very well, as if it were much more recent than thirteen years ago. A polite enough evening ensued, but it didn't bode well for serious courting. The two men were clearly more entertained by each other's bawdy company than by anything that Jennifer could contribute.

“And what do you do for a living, Mr. Vandermeer?” she offered from her rocker.

Walter suppressed his high spirits and tried to respond seriously. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that. I'm what you call a Jack-of-all-trades.”

“The man is going places!” declared her father, lest there be any doubt.

But there was doubt. Jennifer's first impression of Walter was that he was nothing more than a braggart, a tippler and, worst of all, a ne'er-do-well, something to which her father apparently had decided to turn a blind eye.

Indeed, how angry he used to get with her when she showed no interest in her would-be gentleman friend. “You'd better not be so independent!” he had scolded her on a number of occasions. “Other women—prettier women—have their eyes on him! They know a good man when they see one.”

As it happened, though, Jennifer was not quite as independent as her father thought. She had no other man in her life, aside from the grocer, whom, actually, she only spoke to when she went shopping. And she was going to be twenty soon. If the truth were known, she liked it when Walter came calling, as he generally did on Sunday afternoons, equipped with flowers for her and cigars for her father. The two men inevitably shared the cigars, along with some brandy, later in the evening.

By and by, after enough of such Sundays, Jennifer even allowed herself to take a liking to this Mr. Vandermeer. He was, after all, a rather chivalrous sort, cheerful, and a brawny handsome man.

And so, one Sunday afternoon, while her father discreetly excused himself from their company, Walter finally asked for her hand, and Jennifer responded, “Why, that would be very nice. Yes.”

And so they were married.

Her father was so happy that he immediately bought Jennifer a slender book entitled
Bridal Greetings,
by the Reverend Daniel Wise in which, as the author wrote, “The mutual duties of husband and wife are familiarly illustrated and enforced.” Jennifer was grateful to her father for this gift, for the sweet, little book explained the various problems that couples were subject to in the areas of money, family, friends, the home, and so on, and so forth. She eagerly read a new chapter each night in bed before going to sleep, ever more sure that her marriage would be a happy one.

But Walter Vandermeer, as a husband, was to prove a sore test for even the most patient and prepared woman. After a brief honeymoon at Niagara Falls, which was Jennifer's first time away from home, and which occasioned her first intimate pleasures with a man, the two newlyweds moved right back in with Poppa Schuyler. Jennifer never could figure out why her father, who was supporting the two of them, wasn't outraged by the arrangement. A man ought to support his wife, no? But her father didn't seem to mind footing the bills, not even after Peter was born. Walter earned money now and then as a handyman and part-time laborer, but mostly he got along by his winning ways with his father-in-law. To Jennifer's constant exasperation, her father and her husband would often go out drinking together, leaving her home with her infant son. Or, if they stayed home, they'd talk mostly to each other, often about Walter's plans for acquiring great wealth. Jennifer's father loved to hear these plans and usually expressed interest in “staking” him.