“No. But rivers and streams, and they are even now bringing water to the wasteland. You’ll see.”
Caldwell lacked the grandeur of those snowcapped peaks and the diligence of an all-powerful authority making decisions as the Mormons had. I’d become sensitive to how hard it was to get a committee to agree on anything. Our own church committee had grown, but Mrs. Meacham had declined to be our treasurer after the first fund-raiser, so we’d had to find another. Carrie Gwinn, Delia’s sister-in-law, arrived to save our day, and along with the others, Mrs. Mattie Meacham continued to bring her ideas and her laundry on Mondays. At least we’d managed to get to first names in our meetings, and my hope that a church would allow for social interaction and a homelike gathering for women was proving true. I knew my mother would pitch in but worried a little over how she’d find Caldwell.
When we finally arrived home with my parents, we had a mess to contend with. Badgers had dug through the canal as they sometimes did and flooded the area around our house, soaking the five hundred trees Pard had had planted. Most of the water had receded, leaving shiny wet mud to welcome us.
“I thought you said you had no lake,” my father jested.
“Goodness me,” my mother said. “Carrie, how will we—”
“The head gate’s been closed until the badgers’ work is patched, I’m sure,” I told her. “A little adventure here in the West.” I was in my happy lane.
Pard added, “They’ll check for other holes along the canal. Meanwhile, we’ll spend the night at the hotel and after breakfast walk the boardwalk to our sunny home. Just one of the vagaries of desert living.”
It was the great light of the morning desert that won my mother over, I think. The sun rolled up out of the horizon like a lazy boy slowly getting out of bed, then shone with brilliance that warmed the land as far as the eye could see. I’d walked onto the porch outside our room that faced the desert flat and noticed my mother had stepped outside her room too.
“It’s quite dramatic, isn’t it?” We faced east.
My mother nodded agreement. “I didn’t expect the light to be so . . . expansive, so . . . brilliant and yet not blazing bright. It’s quite extraordinary.”
“I’ve planted sunflowers at the house. I love the way their heads turn toward the sunlight and open their faces to the morning.” I wanted her to know that I was happy. “I have found peace here, Mama.”
“Dell! Can you come here, please?” Robert called from behind me.
“Though not a steady peace.” I smiled. “Enjoy for as long as you like. We’ll see you in the dining room.”
It was a rare, uncontested moment with my mother, and I wish now I had let Robert wait. All he needed me for was to find his tie clip. I gave up a miraculous moment for that.
We took breakfast at the hotel with Delia’s croissants, a regular at that cook’s table too.
“These are exceptional. So flaky and light.” My mother rarely complimented anyone else’s baking. “I don’t think I’ve eaten better, even in France.”
“Delia Gwinn makes them. She used to bake them at the freight car we used for a boardinghouse when we first arrived.”
We stepped out onto the boardwalk while Robert got the wagon from the livery. The sun was up by then. “I can show you Robert’s office. We lived above it before we built the house.”
“I’m sure we’ll get the tour, but meanwhile, I’m anxious to see your home as more than an island unto itself.”
“‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’” I straightened her quote of John Donne’s poem. “‘If a clod be washed away by the sea—’”
“We can hope a few clods got washed away and left your home behind,” my mother said.
“It’ll be fine. Robert’s likely already gotten men there to help clean up. The water soaks in and feeds the lawn and nourishes some of the thousand trees we had planted between our home and Caldwell proper. You’ll see as we ride on home.”
She did appear to be impressed and the walkway, while still wet, had been swept of its mud. I tried to see it as my mother might, for the first time. It wasn’t the grand home like the one I’d grown up in nor like any of the Chicago homes that graced the lakeside. But it was well-built, with a sweeping porch around the front and sides, and on that morning with the sun not yet blazing hot, the crisp air, and cry of a hawk catching a current, I thought it a homey place. That’s what my mother called it, “homey,” and in all honesty the three months they spent with us were the homiest of times.
They were both girls, chubby, hair the color of good earth, one with blue eyes, the other with brown. Maybe three months old. Each wore simple homespun dresses carefully stitched, cleaned, and ironed. Kate and Kambree, their mother called them.
“Kate’s got blue eyes; Kambree’s brown.”
“Aren’t they precious,” I said.
We were at the fair and the mother handed the twins to me as I brought change to Carrie Gwinn as the cashier for all the fair events. The Presbyterian committee had a booth to raise funds and inform, and to that booth had come Mrs. Bunting and her twins. “But you can change the names if you’d like.” Their mother was thin as a railroad tie and one could see all the nutrition she got she gave to those twins.
“Pardon me?”
“You could change their names. They don’t know them yet. They was pretty sounding to me. Kate’s a family name. Kambree’s what a sister called her when she tried to say ‘candy.’”
“Those are lovely names,” I said.
I held Kambree as her mother pushed Kate into my other arm. I wasn’t getting the mother’s intent. I held sweet babies at a fair, that was all. Several dozen people milled about on that Saturday church fund-raiser: an agent auctioned off a donated milk cow, a cake-walk with music played on behind me. My parents had wandered off to the booth where for a nickel one could toss a ring over a bottle and win a penny prize, and Robert was at another booth hawking tickets to win a Pullman ride for eight to Omaha. He’d arranged it with his friends at Union Pacific and our own Land Development Company. All that rolled on around us as I held those bouncing babes.
“They’re beautiful, Missus—”
“Bunting. Rose Bunting. Wife of Harold Bunting and mother of eleven other Buntings. The twins are numbers twelve and thirteen.”
“Congratulations are in order.”
“Not really. The sad truth of it, Mrs. Strahorn, is that I’m peel—as we Irish say—broken, and with child yet again. I . . .” Tears formed in her eyes. “I can’t care for them as a mother must and I know ye and your fine husband have no babbies. Me and Mr. Bunting talked about it and we felt ye’d be best to care for ’em. We’d make it legal and all. I wouldn’t try to come back later and rob ye of ’em.” She wiggled her fingers before them and both either burped or smiled, I couldn’t tell.
“Oh my goodness. No . . . I . . . we . . . couldn’t. I mean, you’re most kind to think of us but we aren’t prepared—”
“No one’s ever ready. Take some time. We live out a way, have a homestead claim we’re working. I’ve five other girls and six sons, my first set of twins, a boy and girl that we didn’t have to look at their eye color to keep track of.” She smiled, a sad, tired, exhausted smile.
“Dell?” Carrie had joined us. “Do you have the change for me?”
“Oh, yes. It’s in my reticule. Here.” I handed Kate back to her mother, put Kambree into Carrie’s arms, and slipped the reticule from my wrist. “Here you go.” The exchange made, I took Kambree back. She was the most beautiful weight. Those brown eyes big as biscuits stared at me, sober, thoughtful. Pleading?
“She looks a bit like you,” Mrs. Bunting said. “We’re hard workers if ye wonder. Come from good Irish stock. Our parents fled the famine and came here in the ’40s. To Wisconsin, first. Then we read your husband’s books and went to Montana and now, here we are. It was tough until the water came, but we’ve a good wheat crop this year.”
“I’m glad f
or you.”
“But it’s too many mouths. And with a new babby growing within me, I don’t think I’ll have enough for three so close together. You . . . you’d be saving lives to take them as your own.”
She pushed Kate back to me. The larger of the two, her hair was slightly less dark and might turn to blonde as she grew older. Once again I had the weight of both babies in my arms. It felt good, very good. And didn’t people often ask an aunt or uncle to raise a child? Wasn’t that a code of the West to give orphans a chance for family? I knew that orphanages often served children with a parent still living but who couldn’t afford to tend to them and earn money enough to survive themselves, let alone keep a child alive. What she asked was of great sacrifice to save her children. Perhaps other of her children as well. If one got sick . . .
As though she read my mind, she said, “The others are healthy too. My body gave them good starts, all. There’s no sickness runs through our line. All survived, so ye can see they come from sturdy stock.” Sturdy was not the word I would have put to her, frail and pale as she was. I wondered where her husband was and what he looked like. She had good bone structure in her face, emphasized by how thin it was. They’d be attractive young girls. What fun it would be to help them grow up.
Stop it!
I handed both babies back. “I have some things to take care of, Mrs. Bunting. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and you too, Kambree and Kate. Which one is Kambree again?”
She tapped a brown ribbon on Kambree’s chubby wrist. “You wouldn’t want to separate them.”
“No, I . . . must say goodbye now.”
She jostled her babies. “I’ll come by your house later.”
“No. Please. It’s not possible.” I stepped back. The grass was still squishy from where the church lot we’d chosen (that didn’t have a building on it yet) had also been the victim of a badger brigade.
“Talk to your mister. I’ll come by with the girls so Mr. Strahorn can meet them. I know where ye live. Well, don’t everyone know that.” She attempted another smile. “Here. Take Kate. For the afternoon.”
“No—I’ve got to go now. Goodbye, Mrs. Bunting. It was lovely meeting you.”
I turned my back on them. My heart beat like a metronome. Such beautiful children. Such a horrific choice this mother and father had come to, to give away your children to keep them alive. This pioneering, such courage, to do the right thing, to do the best thing. Had they stayed in Wisconsin, would that fertile land have served them better? And Montana. I loved Montana but it could be a harsh land too. Here, with the canal, water promised greater ease, but not when one had thirteen children and another on the way. My sister Hattie said there were ways women used to keep from becoming pregnant. I wondered if this woman knew of them—or was of a faith that prohibited such intervention in the natural order of progeny.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I longed to give birth and had nothing to show for it, while Rose Bunting had thirteen and no end in sight.
“The strangest thing happened at the fair today,” I told my dear husband and parents as we sat at the supper table. I’d hired a cook some months before, and she came in the mornings, prepared lunch and supper meals so we could spend our days together visiting sites, taking the train to Hailey, fishing at that town’s nearby lakes, lounging in the hot springs. Robert kept our shorthorn herd at Hailey. We walked the fields to check on them. We owned the Alturas Hotel there, and sometimes there were management issues he had to tend to in Hailey.
“That’s what fairs are for, aren’t they? Strange happenings?” Robert chewed on a piece of sage grouse deep fried with a milk and flour batter. It was as tasty as chicken ever was.
“You have that strange man who comes by nearly every morning, cursing away, looking disheveled and forlorn. Something really should be done about him.” My mother spoke behind a napkin.
“He’s harmless, Mama, though I do worry about him in the winter.”
“Mentally impaired, is he?” said my father.
“I’ve offered him food now and then, but he scowls and curses, shaking his fist at the sky. Not at me, so I haven’t been worried.”
“I suspect that pistol you carry frightens him off. A good dog could help, Daughter.”
“I doubt he can tell I have a firearm unless he’s heard me shoot rabbits, Papa. He lives in another world where everything is strange, I suspect.”
“What was the strangeness you saw at the fair, Dell?”
“A woman, a Mrs. Bunting, offered us her . . . babies. Her twins, Kate and Kambree—though she said we could change their names if we wished.”
Robert stopped chewing, interested now. “You mean she offered, as in giving them to you for more than just holding?”
“Yes. She said they’d do it legally, that they’d never ask for them back.”
My mother frowned. “Odd names.”
“Not Kate, but Kambree is unusual. It has a lovely ring to it, the two together especially. Musical almost. Kate and Kambree Bunting.”
“Bunting. Yes, I know of them. Big family,” Robert said. “Hard workers.”
“She’s apparently with child, again.”
“Such intimacies to share with a stranger.” My mother shook her head.
“I don’t think she saw me as a stranger, Mama. She knew about us. Well, that’s not hard, I suspect. But it was a plaintive cry that pressed through every word she spoke.” My heart ached thinking about it. Beautiful girls. My fork made a hole in the mashed potatoes.
“Dell.” Robert cleared his throat. “It isn’t possible, you know. We travel so much.”
“Yes, we do that. But—”
“They’re hardy people, those Buntings. The girls will do as well there as anywhere.”
“I wish you could have seen them though. Round little faces.”
“How many siblings?” my father asked. I told him. “They’re doing something right to bring so many into the world and keep them alive.”
The knock on the door interrupted. “She said she would come by.”
“Oh, no, Carrie, surely not.” My mother gasped. Robert’s eyes were large. My father cleared his throat.
“Best you see to the door, Dell.”
“Why don’t you, Robert. Pard?”
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 2 by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 151)
But there was one man and wife at our church fair who, if they did not live in a shoe, had more children than they knew what to do with, the latest being a pair of healthy twins which they insisted that we must take.
27
Desire
Pard took a long, slow walk to the front door. Enough time for me to remember a day in my philosophy class at Ann Arbor, where we entered a discussion about desire, how humans have longings but that we are often better able to describe what our spouses desire, our kitchen staffs, our children or even parents, than we are our own hopes and dreams. Perhaps it’s lack of practice, I remember one student suggesting. Another said it was because once a desire was named, it was more difficult to blame someone else for its not being fulfilled. “Women are notorious for such as that,” expounded the male student who, mercifully, was allowed to live only because what he said carried the tiniest bit of truth. If we never express a desire, we don’t have to be overtly disappointed. How much easier it is to never say “I will write a memoir” than to say it and then lament that one never followed through. Or worse, to never name the thing we want and then suggest we couldn’t have done it anyway because of this or that. Could I say to myself and to Robert, “I desire to keep those two children”? Because I did, so very much.
July 20, 1886
I hoped when Pard went to the door and he saw those babies that he’d make the decision that I so wanted.
But it wasn’t Mrs. Bunting after all. It was a tramp asking for a scrap, which Robert gave him while my mother chastised afterward, “They’ll only keep coming back. You need a dog to bark, one that doesn’t like tramps, o
f course.”
“They do no harm,” Robert said. “They follow the railroad and are better to deal with than the scalawags who set up brothels and gambling houses for the workers. The Chinese are better railroad builders. They keep to themselves and send all their money back to their families.”
“You still need a dog,” my father said. “A big, brawny brute.”
“I’d prefer a bulldog,” I said.
“They don’t like to exercise. A big dog will get you out, Carrie.” My father’s desire was that I be healthier and have a dog lead me to it?
There was no more mention of Kate and Kambree.
But that evening as we prepared for bed, Robert and I talked about the twins, about how he felt when he thought it was Mrs. Bunting at the door.
“What would you have done?” I brushed my hair draped over my shoulder, sprinkled rose water on the tips, then began to braid.
“Invite them in, offer them cookies and coffee, I suppose.” He removed his suspenders, his detached collar. He sat on the edge of the bed, didn’t look at me as he talked, removing things from his pockets, slipping off his bleached white shirt.
“The babies look well fed. They’re beautiful children, Robert. And their mother—she’s desperate.”
“Tell them we’ll get them a cow or something.” His voice was soft.
“You can’t throw money at everything.” I watched him in the mirror. “Do you have no interest at all in having a family?” I was thirty-two but had never really asked that question of my husband. Strange for a woman leaving “obey” out of her marriage vows.
“You’ve always talked about our towns being our children,” he said. “Remember when I picked up a plastic baby nipple on that trip to Denver on the train and didn’t recognize what it was? You told me to give it to Caldwell as ‘that town is teething.’ That made me laugh and I thought then that you’d settled on our life with an unusual array of offspring. You’re an important part in my town building.”
“‘My town building.’ Therein lies the truth. I’m a helper but not one of the creators.”