One Hundred Years of Marriage Read online

  “Your mother has always said, ‘Men’s minds are small compared to God’s, and those who claim to know God completely have the smallest minds.’”

  That was the sort of thing that was beyond me. I climbed up in the wagon and sat beside Mother. She smelled of lavender and the woman had left the soap.

  “It was to be a wedding present for her niece,” Mother said in her croaky voice. “Mrs. Starr left it for me.”

  “That was nice of her. Did you get presents when you were married?”

  “Oh, my, yes,” she said, and the tears started down her cheeks, but she was smiling. “My friends embroidered napkins and table cloths, and one crocheted about a mile of lace meant to go on the edge of a sheet and a pair of pillow slips. I never did anything with it. Sometimes I think about giving it to your bride.”

  “I don’t have a bride.”

  “Not now, of course. You’re just a boy, but you will grow into a wonderful man and have a loving wife.”

  “I will?”

  It seemed beyond belief that I would grow into a man, but the idea of a loving wife was worth a lot, a girl I would never hit, who’d make lace and sing and fix up our place. I swallowed hard.

  *

  Finally, we got shut of Kansas. We’d been heading north for a couple of hours since breaking camp and there was a steady breeze. Mother lay sleeping in the wagon box, her little bones nothing more than an armload of sticks. I wanted to run away with her before she starved to death, but I didn’t know if he’d kill me.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes, we’re rolling along here, and I wonder what your thoughts are.”

  He slowly turned his head to frown at me, then wrenched the side of his mouth with the bad tooth—an uglier face I’d never seen. “You mean my thoughts right now?”

  “It’s just I feel suspenseful all the time.”

  He shook his head. “I’m thinking that harness is wearing through,” he said gesturing between the horses.

  How lucky he was to have a brain like that—one that stayed fixed on such things while my boy’s brain was tormented worrying the rope was cutting her wrists, and feeling a sickening shame about the chain. Would she ever forgive us? But I felt even worse now knowing that what was happening to me—my heart being gnawed at by a sharp-toothed weasel—was not happening to Dad. We were two different kinds.

  His mind was still, and his voice calm whether talking to me or to Mother or to some stranger he was asking for water. It must have been the soldiering that had made him so calm. Maybe this was his Courage which I’d imagined him wearing into battle like a knight’s suit of armor. He had Courage and now he was inside it, calm and easy, feeling no hungry weasel, nor lying awake at night gritting his teeth not to cry.

  *

  One evening in order to rest my mind, I took the paper keyboard out of Mother’s trunk, carried it away from the wagon and weighted the ends with stones. I felt shy about putting my fingers to the keys without Mother there to sing, but as soon as my thumb touched the middle C, her voice, as clear as could be, sang beside me. Her body wasn’t there, but somehow in my fingers, like I was playing on a real instrument, was the power to bring her voice. After that I kept the rolled up paper piano in my own satchel with my Longfellow book and my empty travelogue.

  We’d been sticking close to the banks of the Big Blue for three days, and it had brought us way into Nebraska, almost to Beatrice where we camped. They must have had a little rain in the area, because the air was sweet in the morning. Dad had made Mother swallow a little mush before he laid her back in the wagon. I’d just come up from washing the mush pot and the bowls and saw him looking at the pink dawn light on the river.

  “From Beatrice there’s a good road straight north to Lincoln.” He said this, then picked up his saddle, always the last thing he loaded, but he stood still, didn’t turn toward the wagon.

  “Aren’t we heading east to Broken Bow?”

  “No.”

  “We’re not taking her to Aunt May?”

  “No.”

  “Why would we want to go to a big old place like Lincoln?”

  “There’s nothing left of our place in Broken Bow. All blown away.”

  I realized then we were whispering. “But Aunt May’s there, teaching school.”

  “If the school’s still there.” He didn’t move, just held the saddle and stared at me. The morning breeze shook the hickories with a fluttery pink light that made my Dad come and go before my eyes. “We’re taking your mother to the state insane asylum in Lincoln. We’ll be there by evening tomorrow.”

  He left me under the trees with the mush pot and plates dripping against my shirt. I’d heard of the asylum. That’s what the kids in the schoolyard meant when they said, “They should send you to Lincoln.” It meant you were crazy and should be locked up in the mad house. Bad as I thought he was, I’d never guessed this was what he was up to, locking her up with strangers.

  I managed to put the pot and the bowls away in the slotted box before I climbed aboard, but I don’t recall much until I lay down beside my mother that evening. Dad was staking the horses beside a creek.

  “Mother?”

  “I’m sorry, Danny,” she said.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked.

  She nodded and the motion squeezed tears out of her eyes.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I told him, before I ever went into our creek, to take me back to Lincoln, but he said I’d always got better before, and I should hang on. But now, I know I cannot bear it there. I have not the strength.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “After each of your sisters—”

  “Yes?”

  “After each birth a sort of black grief— Just minutes old, the poor little things, too weak to suck and then—” She held out her empty hands.

  “Aunt May told me.”

  “I cried for weeks. The preacher at the asylum said I needed to accept God’s will and let the grieving go. And I did get better, each time, and came home. But Danny, even when you were born and lived, I was filled with a despair that was in every way the opposite of what I should have felt with a fine baby son, so bright and with such a vigorous voice.” She paused and smiled as she always did about my loud bawling. Then she clutched my hand. “Inside me, like a flood of black ink through all my blood and thoughts, a kind of hopelessness I just can’t shake off.”

  “And you feel that way now?”

  She nodded, and I saw some gray at the edge of her dark hair and wrinkles around her hazel eyes. She took a deep shuddery breath. “I don’t want to be a burden to you and him. I figure a mother who can’t work should be put away, but tonight—” She choked. “Please, Danny Boy, let me go so I can end this pain. I know what to do this time.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said. “I’ll tell him I’m going to read to you after supper.”

  Dad nodded and seemed glad when I told him about reading to mother. I started with her favorite Psalms, reading clearly and with meaning as I’d been taught. I heard Dad settling down by the fire and realized he might be listening, too. So after I’d read from the letters to the Corinthians and the Ephesians, I turned back to Genesis, not the exciting part about making the world, but the begats. I read slowly in a sleepy voice: “And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah. And Salah lived thirty years and begat Eber.” I let longer and longer pauses between the words and read softer and softer. Mother’s eye were bright and darted from my face to stare through the wagon sheet in Dad’s direction. I was more awake than I’d ever been, but sure enough, Dad began to snore—louder than usual, deeper asleep, I guessed, than he’d been on the whole trip.

  Lying on my back, I crooked up my knees and pushed myself along, worm-like till I could reach under the seat for the Winchester. Mother’s head was raised, but I gave her a sign not to move until I had wormed my way back to the tailgate, holding up the rifle and repeating
over and over, “And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years and begat sons and daughters.”

  I helped Mother down, and we moved quietly out of the moonlight into some willows along the creek bank. At first we ran just to put some distance between us and the camp, then I took her hand and tried to lead her around, so we’d get back on the road in the direction to head back to Beatrice. But she kept pulling in the direction of the water. “We must get to the road or we’ll get lost in the dark,” I whispered.

  “You go,” she said. “Leave me here by the still water.”

  “Not now,” I gasped, but before I could turn her, I heard a crashing behind us.

  “Oh Danny, don’t let him take me!”

  I raised the gun, aimed and fired twice. My father cried out and fell in the underbrush. Then there was a terrible silence. I didn’t breathe. My mother stood beside me like a stone. Finally a voice came. “Olivia!”

  She ran to him. It was dark all around.

  My father rolled onto his back. Mother opened his shirt and slid her hand in to feel about on his chest for wounds. I stooped beside her.

  “Help me get him to the wagon.”

  All the way to the wagon Mother talked very sharply to him. “Come on, James, you’re not so bad off you can’t get you legs under you.” And the same to me. “Get the smallest pot and bring water to a fierce boil. Now!”

  He crawled into the wagon, and she made him lie on his side.

  “One bullet has gone in but not come out,” she said as she felt along his back.

  The worst part was waiting for the water to boil. I held a clean cloth pressed against his side to hold in the blood while she sharpened her little pocket knife, round and round on the flint as she muttered, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” over and over she prayed; round and round she drove her knife against the flint until I feared there would be no blade left. I held the lantern while she made a slit in my father’s flesh and pried out the bullet from between two back ribs. He passed out while she was operating.

  *

  We camped there for ten days, and the whole time Mother was near her old self. She made Dad lie completely still so his blood wouldn’t start again. I hunted for meat to make him strong. She skinned or ripped the feathers off anything I brought her and cooked the things Dad and I had missed—dumplings and fritters. She washed all the blood from our clothes and bathed Dad’s head with a damp cloth off and on all day and all night, and once his fever was gone, she repacked all our gear and swept the ground around the fire.

  When not out hunting, I stayed at her side and tried not to be useless while I waited for her to speak. I might have killed my father—a thought too horrible to let my mind rest on. But the big question for me was whether I had been a bad son to my mother as well, and I waited for her to tell me.

  “Will you let him get up tomorrow?” I asked as she and I sat beside the fire.

  “Yes, tomorrow. His color is good, finally. A day longer, and he’ll be too weak to stand.”

  “What will we do then? There is no reason to—”

  “Your father will decide.”

  “But you are all yourself again. Working.”

  “I work to stay ahead—” She was sitting on a log, not in the pretty, lady way she once did with her back straight and her feet tucked in together. She sat now bent over, her knees spreading her skirt like a farmer’s wife.

  “Ahead of what, Mother?”

  Her eyes slowly raised from the embers, but they were not my mother’s eyes. For the first time since the shooting, she began to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean—”

  She jumped up and grabbed the broom and began to sweep. “Though the waters roar and foam though the mountains tremble,” she muttered as fast as she swept, and I realized I had been a bad son to her all along.

  *

  A wind from the north had driven straight into the wagon all day, slowing us, telling us not to keep on in this direction, so it was late when we came upon the awful towers and barred windows of the State Asylum in Lincoln. The moon, coming and going from behind blowing clouds, would light up the place one minute, then spare us the next. All day I’d sensed Mother growing stiller inside herself like a room in which the candles were being snuffed out one by one. A Quaker with no more inner light, she lay in the wagon as though already in a coffin and neither cried nor muttered any Bible verses.

  Dad went inside himself as well, growing even duller than he was already. But I didn’t hate him. I envied him. He was going inside his Courage, and he would be safe and calm there. As for me, I felt I was going to a hanging—one where I, myself, would have to hold the rope.

  The place looked like a terrible castle with turrets and an iron fence all around. I listened for cries from the prisoners, but couldn’t hear because Dad didn’t drive the team up to the door, but stopped outside a big iron gate. He handed me the reins. Lifting the latch on the gate, he walked with great swift strides across the yard, his coattail flapping in the wind. The moonlight was steady now casting a long, skinny shadow out from my father’s feet on the short, dry grass, bleaching it to look like snow. I‘d not seen snow nor packed a snowball in a hundred years.

  Dad banged a great iron ring against the door, and the sound struck my chest and started me breathing again. The door opened and he slipped in. Mother lay so still, the thought crossed my mind she might be dead—what she’d wanted all along though I’d been too stupid to see it.

  After a while, Dad came out with two thick looking men, one carrying a lantern. I watched the three coming across the yard. I had but to slap the reins to haul me and Mother away from this place, but I knew there was nothing the likes of me could do to save her.

  “Olivia Jane,” Dad whispered and opened down the tailgate. “I cannot carry you in, so you must walk. There are two men out here, but I’ve told them not to lay hand on you.”

  Mother said nothing. I made myself turn and look. By the light of the lantern I watched my father gather the skirt hem about her ankles and pull her from the wagon with no more protest nor cooperation than he’d get from a bolt of canvas. He set her on her feet. Then he climbed in and reached up to unhook Mother’s little armless rocker and set it on the ground. While she waited, he slid out her trunk with all our finest things and our best rug. He nodded to the men and took hold of her hand. They all started toward the building, the man with the lantern going ahead, carrying the trunk on one shoulder, and the other with the rocker and the carpet, walking behind. Before they got to the door Mother let go Dad’s hand and folded her hands on her waist.

  The man with the lantern kicked open the door, so Mother never paused, but walked right across the threshold followed by the man with her rocker and carpet. The door closed. Dad stood alone in the yard.

  “Mother!” I ran across the yard. “Stop her, Dad!” I ran past him and banged my fists on the door. “We can’t leave her here alone.” He grabbed my wrists, but I twisted away and kicked him. “Get her out, Dad. Get her out. She’s ours, Dad. Get her out!”

  He grabbed me up and ran and didn’t stop until we were outside the gate. “I hate you. I hate you.” I screamed and kicked. But his iron arms stopped my breath. He held me against him and laid his hand on my head to press my cheek against his wet neck. “Swallow it, Danny,” he whispered. “Swallow it down.”

  *

  That night Dad and I started back to our claim in Oklahoma Territory. I lay in the wagon box a lot the first few days of the trip. I felt he hadn’t loved her and therefore it was not a sin what he’d done. I had loved her, but not enough. She wouldn’t have got that crying sickness if I’d loved her more.

  Now and then, I raised my spirits by playing the paper piano in the back of the wagon. Mother’s voice was growing fainter, so I had to sing the notes myself, but that did no good, for I always sang the right note no matter where my dumb fingers struck. It was a kind of cheating.

  One
afternoon as I rolled up the paper, I stared at my father’s back, the knobs of his spine arcing forward, elbows resting on his knees. He was so bent the underside of his hat brim was all I could see of his head. I climbed forward to sit beside him.

  “Are you lonely, Dad?” The cheek jerked with the bad tooth, but he kept looking ahead to the southwest. Finally, he nodded—one dip of his scraggly face.

  “Then I’ll stay up here,” I said. I knew I would need to do all the talking, but that was fine with me because whenever I stopped talking, I could feel the weasel sneaking up on me. The names Andersonville and Lincoln Asylum kept coming into my mind, and I knew I’d feel better if I was sitting next to a soldier

  THE END

  THE LUCKIEST LITTLE THING IN THE WORLD

  1887

  Some wives run away. Victoria’s own mother escaped as a ghost.

  A photograph was taken of my parents on their wedding day in Asheville, North Carolina, November 1870. I came upon this cardboard-framed portrait wrapped in a remnant of gray silk in their bedroom highboy. Ten or eleven-years-old at the time, I worked with trembling fingers to unwrap something Mama clearly wanted wrapped up. But I knew it immediately for what it was, and I couldn’t breathe. The groom in a beautiful frock coat looked perfectly frozen, standing straight, chest out, his mustaches curled up, his tall hat reverently balanced on his palm. The girl in a silk bonnet seated to his left appeared, by the fierce look in her eyes, to be trying to stay still. But what had been easy for the groom had been beyond her. And the mouth was blurred as though she had started to say something.

  “Oh, Victoria, darlin’, kindly put that back as you found it,” Mama said. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me, and I jumped. “That ruined thing,” she said. “See how my mouth is all catty-wampus. A regular mess. Put it away. Please.”

  I looked down at the photograph. It didn’t look ruined to me. She had many times told me how Father, a lawyer, a man of property, had fallen in love and rescued her from want and desolation. He married her when she was just sixteen. I thought of Mama in the flames of the war and in the mean times that followed, and my heart raced. She must have believed herself to be the luckiest little thing in the world to ascend from the ashes of a small farm near the Smoky Mountains into the shelter of society in Asheville, North Carolina. Society in all the cities of the South was in grave distress in those days because of the loss of homes and property and businesses, but there were men like my father, Gilbert Alphonse Jenkins, who made a quick recovery. The idea of the orphan girl on her wedding day was terrifying and romantic. And here in my hands was a proof of the stories Mama had told me of their love.