The Last Letter (27 page)

Images of her mother, pregnant with Yale, in the rocking chair, oil-lamp illuminating the letters she couldn’t seem to put down. Katherine pulled the stack out of the trunk then smelled them. She plucked at the charred edges, half hoping they’d fall apart in her hands, only partly wanting to know what she was looking for.

Sitting there, letters in her lap, Katherine sobbed, not grasping what specifics brought such a surge of emotion. “We’re not crying people,” Katherine said to herself, wiping tears with the back of her hand, the scent of dust filling her nose.

She sneezed and lifted the first letter. A love letter from her mother to her father in the year before their elopement.

Dearest Frank,

You worry how we will contend once Father disowns me for our nearing elopement? It is not for a nice house that I am going to marry you but for LOVE and wherever you go, I will always gladly go with you. O darling! You don’t know how much I wish to be your wife…

Though no longer sobbing, tears careened down Katherine’s cheeks, as the words painted vibrant pictures of love—the kind only teenagers afflicted with first affection could with seriousness, appreciate. She found herself laughing at her parents’ sugary words, their innocence, their hopefulness.

How could everything have gone so wrong? Katherine had never considered the
how
of the matter, only that it did go awry in the worst manner and in her eyes it was solely the responsibility of her mother. She’d admitted as much the day they left the prairie. And within weeks of leaving…Katherine squeezed her eyes shut on the memory. She couldn’t bring herself to recall the events.

All she could do was feel the hate and resentment she’d carried all these years. She crumpled the letter in her hand before she realized she’d done it. She was so scared of what she’d forgotten. No! She wouldn’t let her past rule her anymore. She smoothed the letter back out on her legs. It was time to move forward. And, so she sat. Reading for hours before falling asleep among the letters that spilled out of her lap, splashing over the floor, flooding the attic with her parents’ crippled past.

Chapter 13

1887
Dakota Territory

Just days after the grasshoppers took the crops, every man but Frank lit out for the railroad and before long, money began arriving on the prairie. From Nikolai and Mr. Hunt there were letters dripping with yearning—the desire to come home, to sleep beside wives, hear children’s laughter, and again, take control of one’s life and property.

Templeton wrote to the Arthurs and the Moores. Jeanie read the letters, searching the straightforward prose for secret indications Templeton had come to think of Jeanie the way she entertained him in her mind.

Not that she had much time for such things. The assessment of the property revealed that, in the way God or whoever is responsible for orchestrating events such as the fire and the feasting grasshoppers, odd pockets of unaffected property presented themselves.

On the Arthur’s land grew a substantial clump of undisturbed chokeberry bushes. Their green and red leaves, and clusters of rich red berries burst forth as though mocking nature, its apparent anger or nonchalance that people were attempting to tame this portion of the world. A tall, chubby hackberry tree stood nearby the chokeberry bushes and when Jeanie took the kids to pick the berries, they couldn’t help but spend at least half an hour staring at the hackberry, wondering how its enormity was overlooked by the crazed, ravenous grasshoppers.

“Well, it’s obvious, the light of God lives in that tree and these bushes for them to have survived the hoppers,” James said. “I’m starting to buy into the Quaker way of thinking.”

Jeanie put her arm around James and kissed his cheek. “It sure looks like God was present in this little patch of earth, doesn’t it.” She didn’t believe in God, but she’d never been the type to stop talk of him. Just in case.

“He’s in me, Mama, I can feel it,” Katherine said, wiggling in between and wrapping her arms around Jeanie and James.

“The only God in you is Jesus, the one who knows the meaning of Psalm 23. Does that Quaker God understand what it is to walk in the valley of darkness? I ain’t heard that.” Tommy said. He dug in the dirt at their feet and looked up at them, peering from under the brim of his hat.

“I believe you’ve taken to being contrary for contrary’s sake,” Jeanie said. “I’m glad you’ve been reading. I’m glad you found something that feels important in the Bible. But I’d appreciate if you didn’t lapse into the use of ain’t or any other slang.” Jeanie really didn’t know what she thought about Tommy and his sudden Bible-beating ways, but it wasn’t her problem to sort out. She’d taught her children to be thinkers, readers, designers of their own lives. If this was where it took Tommy, so be it.

“We’ve lapsed in just about every other way, why not language?” Tommy said. Jeanie cocked her head to glimpse Tommy’s face to see if he was nudging her out of boredom or if he was genuinely curious at the collapse of their normal societal manners.

“What do you mean, Tommy?”

Jeanie kneeled down beside him. James took Katherine toward the crest of a hill to get a “feel” for the weather coming their way. Jeanie could hear James explaining that if they stood with their backs to the wind they could determine low pressure on their left and high on their right. If the pressure is coming from their left, they could be assured a storm. Jeanie peered around the side of Tommy, watching James put his arm around Katherine’s shoulder and she looking up at him with an admiring, curious gaze as their voices disappeared with their footfalls.

Though Templeton was gone to the railway, his influence on James’s hobby of weather indications hadn’t been dampened, and since he didn’t have Templeton to prattle on about the state of moisture in the atmosphere, Katherine was more than happy to lend her ear to the task. And Jeanie fully realized how much she missed Templeton. Having him around had been comforting even though James spent far more time with him than she ever did.

Tommy lay back in the dirt, arms behind his head, closing his eyes to the sun. “I have to admit I sort of like the lapse in convention, when it’s not unsettling me.”

“What?”
Jeanie didn’t know what he meant, but she could feel it wasn’t a good revelation he was coming to.

“Well, the way everyone does different jobs—the women plow when needed, the men do the dishes, and the way the sisters Moore live alone, forging their own way in life without the help of men. Except for those who want to stop by for hello. Like Father. In some ways, he seems happier than ever, helping the sisters, listening to them talk while he does the work they should be doing—”

“Tommy. What on earth are you talking about?”

He shrugged, not responding other than that.

Jeanie grasped Tommy’s arms and pulled him to sitting. Jeanie’s stomach clenched. Not fully knowing what Tommy was hinting at didn’t stop her body from sensing it wasn’t good. She’d felt like this before. But Frank had promised never again.

Tommy drew back and when his face registered pain, Jeanie let go and covered her mouth to gather her poise. She could hear Tommy’s uneven breathing as she delved into her mind searching for what bothered her so much about Tommy’s news. Was it that Frank was doing someone else’s work when he should have been doing more around the house?

She felt dizzy with confusion. If he finished his daily assignments so easily then he should have made his way back home, and if he was going to help the women’s right’s fanatics, Lutie and Ruthie, to a life of finer, leisurely existences, then he had better, he had no right, absolutely…crazed thoughts of the women in Des Moines…the comforting attention they offered him over the years, interest he could explain away came to Jeanie. Could there have been more to it? She had forced herself to trust him, what choice had she? But now?

Jeanie’s thoughts shot around her mind, visions of Lutie, on her lounge, dress draped against her undergarmentless bosom and hips and knees, and Ruthie, how could she allow such debauchery to occur under her roof? Jeanie covered her ears as though the thoughts were coming from outside of her head. She couldn’t just allow this to happen.

“Get your wiggle on, Tommy,” Jeanie said.

“What? What’d I say?”

“Let’s go, full chisel.” Jeanie dashed toward the horses and hoisted onto Summer and took her to a fast trot. She screamed up the hill at James and Katherine. They shot around, faces crinkled, questioning. They bolted from the top of the hill, their limbs churning over the land. Katherine’s bonnet fell off her head while James held his hat on with his hand.

Jeanie didn’t know exactly what she was so upset about, but she knew enough to shut her bazoo in the presence of her children and to go to the source of the problem rather than wallow in unknown possibilities.

The children hopped onto Night and every once in a while Jeanie looked back at them as she charged toward the homestead of Lutie and Ruthie Moore, but she didn’t let up. Her legs gripped Summer’s sides and the steady galloping motion soothed her jagged thoughts. She would find her answers. She would not be made a fool.

She reached the Moore’s soddie and brought Summer to a short halt that stirred up a cloud of dirt. Jeanie grasped her chest, her breath catching faster than she wanted it to. From the chimney rose a thin snake of smoke, evoking a level of peace that seemed incongruous to what swept through Jeanie at that same moment. She swung her body off the horse, remembering she was pregnant only when the pressure from using her belly as a dismounting lever made pain radiate from her middle around her back.

She stopped and bent into the pain that seized her middle. She blew out her air and smoothed the front of her dress. She held her hands at her waist, pushed her shoulders down and proceeded as though dropping into the Moores for afternoon tea.

The only thing that escaped Jeanie’s restraint was her knock, the way she wailed on the door like a person seeking refuge during a grasshopper invasion. The door flung open and Lutie and Ruthie stood there, masking what was inside, presumably Frank. Both women’s faces reddened, mouths falling open as they looked around, trying to avoid eye contact with Jeanie.

“Frank’s here, I gather.” Jeanie’s lips pursed and she tried to relax them, to dispel any evidence of tension or anger. She wouldn’t play the stupid, weak woman, the one who crumbled at the feet of her husband’s lover and she wouldn’t be the wife who drifted into histrionics and hysteria in order to show her dominance.

“Why, yes. He’s ill this morning,” Lutie said. She stepped aside, sweeping her hand as though to make a path for Jeanie to follow into the house. Ruthie stood, still, her expression frozen in fear. Jeanie could see Ruthie’s throat jump as she swallowed and Jeanie felt a surge of pity for Ruthie, for having to live with Lutie’s indiscretions.

Jeanie crossed the threshold and in a motherly way, squeezed Ruthie’s forearm to tell her she understood her plight at living with the woman Jeanie would forever think of as Loose Lutie.

Jeanie walked from one end of the house to the other even looking under the lounge as though Frank’s body could fit between it and the floor. The place was dismal looking, not at all as Jeanie remembered it. The least of its squalor was a thick layer of dirt over every surface that wasn’t equipped to support a sleeping body. The worst was refuse littering the place, a stench of poorly dried or rotting meat. Jeanie covered her mouth. She looked at both women, searching the faces for the reason their home would appear this way. Jeanie’s eyes traced their bodies, searching for signs that they’d stopped keeping themselves up.

Jeanie turned then said over her shoulder on the way to the bedroom, “You might want to think about cleaning this place up. Before someone takes ill.”

Lutie shrugged, her hair a bit greasy, but still fanned around her shoulders in sweet curls. Jeanie, repulsed by the slovenly appearance of the house, stood at the bedroom door and turned the knob. She pushed through the door.

Frank lay on the bed, flat out, sleeping harder than Jeanie’d ever seen him. Over his work shirt was a wide-knit cream-hued sweater. He was dressed but his pose lent the situation an air of familiarity that sickened Jeanie. How could he just lay there, take to another woman’s bed even for a nap? She’d expected to see him hiding, climbing out the window, doing anything to help him get away from his affair with Lutie Moore. His slack face and the rag over his forehead made Jeanie forget the reason she’d stormed to the house and instead she just went to him, sat on the bed and put her face next to his. Did he smell like Lutie? Was something different?

“He’s ill, Jeanie,” Lutie said.

Jeanie nodded, moved the rag away and felt his forehead. “I’d imagine he’d be ill in this hot sweater. I’m sure I’ve never fashioned him any such thing.”

“I made it. Pattern 311 from the back of…let me think…I can’t, not your book—”

“Definitely
not my book. I don’t recall designing fisherman couture or suggesting it for anyone who wasn’t within walking distance of an ocean and a bucket of fish.”

Lutie pursed her lips. “Well, I’m not very skilled you know, but I took your advice and tried something. Something I thought might be impressive because it was different.”

“Help me get it off of him. He’s soaked to the bone.”

Lutie got beside Jeanie and helped her wrestle the sweater off his limbs. “He was shivering not ten minutes before. He was working so hard for all of us. I just, well, I won’t say a word more.” Lutie said, her eyes conveying fright.

When wasn’t Frank ill? He was more fragile than the Limoges china Jeanie parted with in Des Moines. “Don’t want to incriminate yourself, eh?” Jeanie pushed out a phony cackle to cover her true fear—that Frank had indeed left her, at least mentally for this younger beauty, divorced or not, apparently, none of it mattered to Frank. Jeanie wished she’d been more inclined toward religion, that she’d forced it on Frank. Even if she didn’t believe, she should have respected its power to make people behave appropriately out of fear of going to hell. She should have been smarter.