Rexanne Becnel
Authors: When Lightning Strikes
Rexanne Becnel
In 1855 Nathaniel Hawthorne complained to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success.”
To scribbling women everywhere,
I fondly dedicate this book.
1
St. Joseph, Missouri
April 19, 1855
M
ORGAN. HOW SHE HATED
having to go by the last name Morgan.
Abigail Bliss stared gloomily across the brown, churning waters of the Missouri River and beyond, to the rolling plains of the Kansas Territory. Everything was brown. The dried grasses, the few trees, the mud. The water. Even the sky, cold and heavy, threatening rain—or maybe sleet—was dark and muddy-looking. Until the wild prairie grasses began to grow, providing forage for the animals, the wagon train was going nowhere.
Maybe this year the grass wouldn’t turn green at all and they wouldn’t be able to go. But Abby knew that was a foolish hope. With a resigned sigh she moved nearer the bluff, braving the icy wind that raced across the endless, unobstructed plains. She clutched her blue broadcloth skirt and muslin apron with one hand as she peered down at the activity below. Wagons lined up along the banks of the rushing water, a long ribbon of white canvas covers, waiting to be ferried across.
The entire world appeared to be waiting on the banks of the Missouri River. People from Iowa and Illinois, from Missouri and Indiana, and even farther east. Everyone was waiting for the river to go down, the muddy ground to firm up, and the prairies to turn green. Only then would they swim the stock and ferry the wagons across. And so everyone in St. Joe just had to bide their time.
Abby turned her back on the river and the biting wind—and the territory beyond. She’d grudgingly reconciled herself to the fact that they were making the long trek to the Oregon Territory, but she didn’t pretend to like it, nor to understand one thing about her father’s desperate urge to get going. His insistence that they go by the name Morgan made absolutely no sense to her; at times she thought he was crazy. Today especially she was hard-pressed to be charitable toward him, for he’d sold her beloved pet, Becky, this morning, the pony he’d given her on her tenth birthday. He’d sold the pony to get an extra brace of oxen, as the wagon master had advised.
If it weren’t for Tillie and Snitch, she would be completely alone.
Abby removed her precious paper tablet from her apron pocket, then found a protected spot and sat down. She pulled out one of her two graphite pencils and absently checked the point.
Tillie and Snitch. She’d decided to make this story longer than her previous ones, aimed at slightly older children. Perhaps an adventure. She opened the tablet to the first page, where she’d drawn her two mouse characters. Tillie was delicate with tiny gray paws and pink-tinged nose and ears. Snitch was always trying to protect her, even when she didn’t need it. He was big and strong, and sometimes clumsy. But he looked out for her.
A shout wafted up from the river below, but Abby deliberately shut it out and pursed her lips in concentration. Then she smiled, caught up as always in one of the fanciful tales she’d been spinning since she was a child. What if Tillie and Snitch decided to go west? What if the family Tillie lived with decided to leave Rose Hill Farm? Maybe Tillie decided to go, too, and Snitch … Snitch couldn’t bear to say good-bye to her. The big lug. When was he going to realize that he loved her?
“Where have you been?”
Abby winced at her father’s sharp tone. Although Robert Bliss had always been stern, he’d tempered it with love. Lately, though, his patience had grown short and his tone curt. More often then not, his ill humor was directed at her.
“Abigail. I asked you a question.”
“Yes, Papa. I’m sorry. I should have told you that I planned to take a walk. See the sights.”
“Alone? You wandered the streets of this uncouth town alone?”
When her father used that tone of offended morality, Abby inevitably felt like an errant child. Though she very nearly matched him in height, it was all she could do to remind herself that she was twenty now, not twelve.
“I went up to the bluffs,” she explained, burying her resentment beneath the mien of a dutiful daughter. “I was alone and completely safe—”
“This is not Lebanon, Missouri.” Then her father sighed and rubbed his balding pate. “You’re young. You do not comprehend how immoral this world can be. How godless and truly diabolical some people are.”
“Nothing happened, Papa.” Abby put a hand on his arm, searching for the father who used not to scold so severely, for the man he was before her mother—his beloved Margaret—had died. “I went up to the bluffs—you know the spot. I looked west across the Missouri and the prairies toward Oregon.”
He stared at her with eyes just like her own, changeable eyes that veered from green to hazel to brown. Now they were a dark, indistinct color. “You went up there to write, no doubt.”
Abby smiled a little. He was softening. “Yes. I admit I did. I’ve decided that Tillie and Snitch are going to take a trip on a wagon train.”
He snorted as if in disgust. But beneath his newly grown mustache, his lips curved in the beginning of a smile. “You’d do better to read from the Scriptures. Or at least the classics.” He gestured with the book in his hand, a well-read copy of
The Odyssey,
and shook his head. “Two mice.”
“I study my Bible every night, Papa. You know that. And when have you
ever
needed to encourage me to read?”
“Yes, but
what
you read. Frivolous stories.” He cocked one bushy gray brow at her. But then he patted her arm. “You’re a good daughter, Abigail.”
They made a peaceful meal and evening of it after that. In the two and a half months since they’d left their home in Lebanon, Abby had become quite adept at cooking from the back of a wagon. Her father always built the fire while she set up the plank table that swung out from the side of the wagon. While water heated in a cast-iron pot propped up in the fire, she made biscuits, sliced potatoes, carrots, onions, and ham for a soup; and ground a handful of coffee beans.
“Captain Peters announced that our company leaves within the week,” Robert said once Abby had cleared his emptied plate from the table. He took out his pipe, packed it with tobacco, then waited as Abby lit a twisted straw switch and brought it to him. He puffed three times before the tobacco caught. While he leaned back to enjoy his evening smoke, she scraped the plates clean, gathered the utensils, cups, and pots, then folded the table back.
“Sit down a minute before you attend to the dishes,” he said, gesturing to the chair opposite his.
Abby didn’t wait to be told twice. She was tired through and through. Living out of a wagon was hard, though she knew that wasn’t the entire reason. She’d cooked and cleaned and done laundry and all the other household chores ever since she’d been old enough to be of any help. And for the past three years she’d taught school as well. No, it wasn’t the work that made her so weary. It was her father and his secrecy. The not knowing.
From the day her mother had taken ill, her father had changed. For all his sternness—his schoolmaster’s demeanor—Robert Bliss had loved his wife completely. Only now did Abby recognize how her mother had softened him and brought out the gentleness in him. But when Margaret Bliss had died last fall, he’d begun to change. Still, it hadn’t gotten bad until four months ago. He’d received a letter. That’s all she knew. Ever since then he’d been obsessed with moving west. First California. Now Oregon.
He’d uprooted them from their cozy little cottage behind the schoolhouse in Lebanon. He’d sold everything in order to stock their wagon for the lengthy trip. But he’d refused to explain a thing to her. It was that fixed silence that wore at her the most. That and the fact that he insisted they go by the name Morgan.
The last time she’d questioned him had been the worst. He’d brought the new wagon home and told her to begin packing. “But why? Why?” she’d asked, consumed by an unaccustomed anger. “Why must we leave our home?”
When he’d remained silently obstinate on the subject, her anger had dissolved into a bitter grief. “If we have to leave here, must we go so far? Surely there are relatives somewhere? I know you have none, but surely Mama must have
someone.
Distant cousins. Uncles or aunts.”
“There is no one. No one!” he’d shouted, going from determined silence to a raging fury in the blink of an eye. Abby had been cowed by the intensity of his reaction. Since then she’d been careful of her words, fearful of rousing him to that frightening pitch of anger.
But tonight he was more mellow than he’d been in weeks, and she resolved to enjoy it.
“There was a lot of activity along the riverbank today,” she said. “Dozens of wagons are already lining up to cross.”
“Captain Peters informed me that our company shall make the crossing upstream from here. We’ll assemble tomorrow at daybreak, seventy-two wagons strong. We’ll camp at a spot he has selected, then begin the actual crossing—perhaps as soon as Monday. He expects it will take several days for the entire company of wagons and stock to make their way across.”
He puffed a few minutes and the fragrant tobacco smoke reminded Abby of the peaceful evenings they used to share at home. In the cold spring night a hundred campfires glowed around them, spread out in the dark fields that surrounded the village of St. Joe. Lumped together, the several wagon-train companies were very like a small city, she thought. A gathering of people set to move their entire community, lock, stock, and barrel, to the other end of the continent. When she thought of it like that, it seemed a glorious sort of adventure, one she anticipated gladly.
“The good Reverend Harrison has wisely elected to join with our company.”
Abby paused in the process of unwinding two thick plaits that formed a gleaming coronet at the back of her head. “How nice,” she murmured. “I’m sure the Oregon Territory can use as many preachers as possible. Sarah Lewis tells me it’s a rough and rowdy place.”