Wilson's Hard Lesson (90 page)

I left the fire marshal standing in the road. As I walked
away, my mind was filled with thoughts of destiny. The words of Cassius echoed
in my ears. “Men at some time are masters of their fate.” Was I bound to
quietly go to Robert Benson and be his bride, or was there another avenue open
to me?

The fire marshal had seemed quite certain that his sister
had run off. Surely he would not agree to serving a lifetime of servitude if he
believed Robert Benson to be a murderer. The comments he’d made about his
sister’s character had the ring of honesty about him; Kitty had rebelled
against a marriage and fled, leaving him to pick up the pieces.

It was a choice I could see myself making. What cost would
my Father bear for my flight? There was no way to answer that question. 
Perhaps Benson would change his mind about the desirability of the family home;
perhaps Father would be forced to join the fire marshal’s ranks in the man’s
cadre of unpaid help. Neither option sounded all that good, but both were
infinitely preferable to spending life married to a man I didn’t even know,
much less love.

But where would I go? It’s one thing to say you’re going to
flee, and quite another to have a destination in mind. I’d heard rumors of jobs
in the North; perhaps I could go to New York or Boston and secure a position
there. The idea appealed for a minute, but then I remembered Robert Benson
regularly did business in both cities; with my luck, I’d make my escape only to
encounter my would-be husband upon the sidewalk.

The South was in shambles. I couldn’t foresee how I’d be
able to make a life for myself in any of the former Confederate states; if
there was one thing that was not in short supply down there at that time, it
was young women in dire situations. Adding to their number wouldn’t help me.

I could swim passably well, but crossing the ocean to Europe
was surely beyond my capacity. That left the West. Plenty of people had found
gold in California; there were rumors about great wealth to be found along the
northern shores. Father hadn’t been interested in the prospect, but I could go
alone.

It was a ridiculous proposition, but it certainly had more
appeal than marrying Richard Benson did. If it all turned out to be a disaster
– and making a cross country journey with no prospects, connections, or money
certainly had the potential to go very badly – at least it would be a disaster
I had chosen for myself.  It seemed a fine distinction, and it was, but it was
a distinction that mattered to me.

Resolved to head to California, I steered my steps into
town. There were questions I needed answered, including finding out exactly how
far I could go West given the meager handful of dollars I’d managed to save up
over the years. Surely I couldn’t afford a train ticket all the way to
California, but I’d go as far as I could. After that, I wasn’t sure what was
going to happen. Probably a very long walk lay in my future.

The train station was packed. It felt like everyone and
their best friend were there, waiting to go on a journey, eagerly anticipating
the arrival of the next train, or buying tickets for very complicated
itineraries from a haggard looking clerk. Simply listening to the steps
involved in taking a train from the Shenandoah Valley to Atlanta and then from
there to Texarkana was enough to make my head spin – and I knew my own journey
was going to be much longer.

Feeling slightly intimidated, I stepped out of the train
station. When the crowds were thinner, I told myself, I’d return and get my
questions answered. There was no sense slowing down all of the people so
evidently in a hurry with my inquiries; I had a week before I was to wed Robert
Benson while everyone else had places to be today.

Located nearly next door to the train station was the
newspaper offices. Father had hoped to grow his print shop to the size that the
paper would steer at least some business his way; the editors were locally
famous for penning volumes of religious poems and very moralistic short
stories. Of course, those hopes had all gone up in flames, a fact I could read
about in the broadsheet pinned to the office’s front wall.

The tale was short and to the point. Flames had been spotted
coming from Father’s shop shortly before midnight. I learned that it had been
our elderly neighbor who’d roused the fire brigade, sending her one-armed
grandson running through the night for help.  Apparently there was some
speculation as to the cause of the fire; in a surprising quote, the fire
marshal said he felt it was a clear case of spontaneous combustion. “Printers
use many volatile solvents, inks and chemicals in the course of their trade,”
he said, adding that it was not unusual for the same to burst into flame
unexpectedly.

This was certainly news to me. Not the use of volatile
solvents, inks and chemicals part; I’d been around print shops for nearly the
entirety of my life. But we’d never had a fire – not a spark, not the tiniest
bit of flame – until now.

Perhaps that was due to the fact that Father was always
extremely careful and methodical in the shop. Over the years, we’d been to
other printers, and I’d seen what happens when a man with a slovenly nature
takes charge: oily rags gather like dust bunnies beneath the presses, their oil
streaked surfaces attracting every bit of grime and hair the shop contained;
offcuts from flyers and letter heads covering the floor like autumn leaves –
the sort of chaos where hungry flames would find plenty to feast upon. Father
counted cleanliness to be a virtue. In his shop, the floors were swept clean
every night, inks were kept closely sealed, and if you needed a rag, greasy or
otherwise, you wouldn’t find it beneath the printing press.

The lanterns Father used to light the shop were doused every
night, leaving the place quite dark. This habit he persisted in even in the
perilous period after the war ended; during this time of peace, wandering
thieves would take advantage of every shadowy corner to steal whatever wasn’t
nailed down. Father never minded. “Most of them want food, not books,” he’d
say, “and a man who will steal something for the joy of reading it is likely
enough a man I’d want to count as a friend.”

Remembering those words made my heart swell with pride – at
least until I remembered how angry I was with Father. “Spontaneous combustion
indeed,” I muttered, stepping to the left to read the next page of the
broadsheet. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

I was soon to encounter another thing I’d never heard. Set
in close type, six columns wide and the length of the entire page, the next
sheet of the broadsheet was filled with advertisements. At the very top, a
thirty-point headline screamed “Situations Wanted!”

“What’s this?” I mused aloud. Even though Father brought the
paper home often enough, I’d never seen this type of page before. I leaned
closer to take a better look, and another lady, who’d stepped up to read the
paper beside me, looked over to see what had captured my curiosity. She snorted
in a most unladylike fashion and said “What you’ve got there, Missy, is
messages from frontiersmen who are seeking mail-order brides.”

“Is there no man anywhere who can find himself a loving wife
without going through these extreme machinations?” I asked my paper-reading
companion. She looked at me with puzzled eyes and then shrugged.

“You know what men are,” she replied. “Helpless babies, most
of them. Once their mother’s sick of them they’ve got to get married or they’ll
starve to death.” The thin gold ring on her finger showed me she might have
some first-hand experience with men’s behaviors. “If it weren’t for wives,
there’s men out there who would run around with their clothes in tatters and
holes in their shoes.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “There are men who have wives
that go around the same way.”

My companion laughed.  “But they don’t get to enjoy it the
same way.” She tapped the side of her head. “Having a wife around changes
everything.”

That seemed to be what the writer of the advertisements
seemed to be hoping for. “Wife wanted!” one headline after another screamed,
each one prefacing a tersely eloquent summary of the aspiring groom’s charms.

“Householder with three healthy sons,” one spelled out; it
was a prospect that made my stomach lurch in a most terrifying fashion. The
next belonged to a logger, also a father of three, and the one after that had
only two children and a piano studio in San Francisco.  I considered that one
for a while, until a closer examination of the text revealed that it was very
desirable that all applicants speak Mandarin Chinese.

Lacking the desired tongue, I moved on. Some of the ads
revealed themselves to be nothing more than a laundry list of wants: a wife
seeking a husband must be trim, cheerful, hardworking, and virtuous – not
necessarily in that order, a phenomenon I suspect said more about the groom’s
experiences than his personal preferences.

Confident that I qualified on most counts, absenting this
day which found me none too cheerful, I continued reading the ads for much of
the morning. A train arrived, disgorged its passengers, reloaded and left;
still I stood reading.  For quite some time I stood on the platform, perusing
the ads. They were printed in an almost unreadably small font; squinting
against the sun as it climbed up the horizon toward noontime heights was
beginning to give me quite a headache.

I glanced toward the train station office.  It was near
enough to empty; the few souls that were in there had apparently already
finished whatever business they’d had with the ticket agent. If there was an
ideal time to go in and inquire about the cost of passage to California, this
was it.

Yet I found my feet wouldn’t move. I was frozen in place, as
solidly stuck as if someone had painted the soles of my shoes with stout glue.
Somehow, I’d lost the ability to walk and move of my own free will; it was a
strange paralysis of the likes I’d never experienced.

While I was thus stricken, the rumble of an approaching
train filled the air. I could feel the ground beneath me shaking. For a moment
I thought of the Union guns and the way cannon balls screamed as they tore
through the air. It took all my will to not plaster my hands over my ears;
while we all did such things during the battles, only the rubes did so now.

The train was shorter than most; it had an engine, four
passenger cars, and trailing those, a private car with big windows. Through the
glass I could glimpse a tabletop dressed with white linen; beyond that, I had a
fleeting glance of red velvet upholstery. Painted on the side of the car in
golden letters were the words Benson Trading and Exchange, Limited.

My heart stopped in my chest. I could feel my mouth go dry.
The fear I felt in that moment exceeded anything I’d felt the night before,
watching Father’s print shop burn. The private train car before me belonged to
Richard Benson. Riding inside it was the man so determined to be my husband.

I knew Robert as soon as he stepped out of the train car. He
had to stoop to do so; he was a very tall man, and that considerable height was
exaggerated by the oily-looking black top hat he wore. Such hats were in
fashion, but it suited him poorly; it was too small by half for his bulbous
head.

The man who would marry me had red skin, covered over nearly
entirely with angry boils and acne pustules. Such a thing was not uncommon
among boys and even men my own age, but to see such a compromised complexion in
one nearly Father’s age was revolting. It wasn’t particularly warm that day,
but even at a distance I could see a glistening sheen where his skin appeared
to be weeping.

He was broad, with a thick torso, tree trunk legs, and
ape-like arms that filled his jacked sleeves near to bursting.  Watching him
move was a fascinating spectacle. Robert Benson didn’t walk as much as he
lurched forward, one stiff step after another made without the slightest regard
of anyone else’s presence or position. I saw a mother snatch her young child
out of Mr. Benson’s way with barely a moment to spare; if she’d not acted,
surely he would have trod directly on the tot.

Every bit of the man’s appearance seemed designed to evoke a
response of fear and revulsion. His suit was the darkest black; the walking
stick he carried was topped with a gold-chased burl. I’d heard he’d bragged of
cracking heads with it, and rumors were that he would laugh at a dog’s pained
yowls after he shooed them away.

I couldn’t stop staring at him, but I didn’t want him to see
me. In that moment, I remembered my hair had fallen free from its braids. The
red hue was particularly noticeable in the sun; of all the women of my age in
the valley, I was the only one blessed with auburn locks. This I was sure
Robert Benson knew; the merest glance in my direction would reveal my presence
to him.

There was no time to re-braid my hair. With thick, heavy
locks past my shoulders, putting my hair up properly always took the better
part of an hour, not to mention a mirror and a brush. Besides, in itself, a
braid wouldn’t be enough to conceal the color.

I had a handkerchief tucked up my sleeve. It smelled of
smoke and had gotten a little dingy, but that couldn’t be helped. I managed to
get it secured around my hair in the nick of time. No sooner was the small
cloth knotted than Richard Benson stepped out of the train station onto the
sidewalk. I was no more than twenty feet from him.

The air stilled. I could hear a million cicadas singing,
their fiddling song cutting through the air like a saw blade with an agenda.
When I breathed in, all I could smell was the sickly-sweet odor of rose water;
clearly Benson bathed in the stuff.  I didn’t breathe out. I feared that doing
so might attract his attention. If the sound of my exhalation didn’t do so,
surely the retching I was working so hard to contain would have.

Luckily, most of Robert’s attention was focused on the fact
that his carriage had not arrived as scheduled to pick him up. “I don’t care if
the blasted train is early,” he raged at a short man who toadied alongside him,
carrying a heavy black case and a portfolio stuffed to overflowing with papers.
“I need to go home now. I can’t waste half the day standing around waiting for
Boutwell to show up!” He hit the ground with his walking stick, and then leaned
heavily upon it. “I can’t, and I won’t!”

“You shant have to, Sir,” the short man said. “There’s the
carriage there. He’s coming now.” From down the road, travelling at high speed,
came an ornately painted coach being pulled by a splendid team of matching
chestnuts. It was being driven by a man who bore more than a passing
resemblance to the fire marshal.

Was this, I wondered, Kitty’s other brother?

My curiosity had a weight of its own, apparently. Benson
started to turn in my direction, apparently sensing that someone was watching.
I chose that moment to direct my attention back to the personal ads, deciding
in the heat of that moment that I would answer the very first one I read;
whoever placed that message was surely fated to be my husband.

“Iowa Agronomist Seeks Wife,” the headline read. The ad was
shorter than most. The only other thing it said was “Must Love to Read.”