This Road We Traveled

  But what was that wariness she’d witnessed in her son’s eyes when she suggested that they’d all head west? She guessed she’d find out soon enough.

  2

  Pherne’s Watch

  Pherne Pringle watched her mother make her way through the bladdernut trees with old Joey. She wondered why she’d harnessed the big old mule instead of walking. Maybe her foot bothered her this morning. Still, she insisted on doing such things herself. Perhaps she had news of Orus? Pherne’s brother Orus still ran the Brown and Pringle clan, though he’d been gone for two years. She’d enjoyed seeing the changes in her husband, Virgil, these past two years without Orus’s domination. Virgil had discovered how to linger, giving her a kiss before heading to the barn to tend the stock. His friendly teasing of Sarelia, Emma, and Virgilia and his congratulations to their sons, openly praising them, was something Orus dismissed as coddling whenever he heard an expression of appreciation.

  Still, she missed her brother. It had been months since a stranger brought the last letter affirming that Orus was still alive last fall. If he came back and had inspiring words about the Oregon country, the question would then be, would they go west? Orus would, if he set his mind to it. Or he’d convince them all that what they had here was better. His wife, Lavina, would have no say. But she and Virgil, they had a choice, didn’t they?

  And what if Orus didn’t come back? Could Virgil take over the running of two farms forever? It had been a hard two years, but they told each other it was only temporary. But what if it wasn’t?

  She stopped herself from thinking of that awful possibility and concentrated on scrambling the eggs for the second breakfast, Virgil having eaten bacon, biscuits, and gravy before heading to their fields.

  Her brother had a way of stifling those who disagreed with him or who didn’t see the world as he did. Orus’s older boys tended their father’s fields and helped their stepmother with the eleven children Orus left behind when he headed west. At least Lavina had a rest from being pregnant and nursing another infant. Childbearing took its toll on women, something men failed to understand. Orus’s boys had turned to Virgil for advice on planting and harvest, and Pherne had watched with pride how her husband spoke to the boys as young men, capable, and not just barking orders as Orus did.

  “Aren’t you going?” Her mother hobbled into the house, having tied Joey to the post, and pulled herself up the steps with her walking stick.

  “Going where? I’m fixing Virgil’s second breakfast. Sarelia, push your grandmother’s rocker here so she can rest.”

  “I’m not resting. Orus is back.” Her mother’s voice was the strongest she’d heard in weeks. “Didn’t he stop by? He’s planning a gathering at Lavina’s. Well, I guess it’s his place too. I got in the habit of thinking of it as hers.”

  “Maybe he stopped at the fields and told Virgil. I guess we better mix up some fixings. Blackberry biscuits would be good, don’t you think?”

  Her mother nodded. “But I’m heading on over. I don’t want to miss a thing. He says we’re heading west.”

  “Are we? Well, exciting things await then.” Pherne frowned. “Virgilia, run and tell your father to hurry along. We’ve a gathering to step up for, like it or not.”

  Her oldest daughter helped her grandmother back into the buggy and saw her off before before pushing through the rows of hemp as tall as trees where her father and brothers worked. They were one of the few farming families in St. Charles without slave help, and Pherne was proud that it was so, even though it meant more work for her family.

  Pherne turned back to her dough boy to begin blending flour and water for her biscuits, while Virgilia, now returned, finished up the breakfast. Her mother was so excited about undertaking another journey. Pherne wished she could share that enthusiasm. Already Orus’s presence disrupted her well-laid-out plans for the day, and here she was once again hopping to the fast music her brother played instead of waiting for the peaceful slow waltz of her husband’s.

  And what about her children’s wishes? Would they want to go? Sarelia was her vocal child who had actually inspired her mother’s autobiography by asking so many questions. Emma rocked in the chair by the fireplace. She was Pherne’s baby now, Oliver having lived only nine months. Pherne shivered, busied herself, rushing over the memory ghost. Emma had been quiet as a snowfall most days since Oliver’s death. Could a child so young still grieve the death of her baby brother? Pherne swallowed, fingered the gold locket at her throat, tucked beneath her blouse. She let the grief still so fresh take her away. Then she took a deep breath and returned to her dough.

  Yes, Sarelia was the verbal one; Emma her quietest child at seven. Albro, middle son, was her husbandry child, tending the sheep and cattle. He followed after his father as a dreamer. Octavius would want to go. Would Clark? Already fifteen, he was her studious boy, thoughtful, often engaging in philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and God’s relationship to man as he worked in the family boot-making shop. And then Virgilia, her firstborn, seventeen, who was her helpmate. In ways, Virgilia was more like a younger sister than a daughter. She’d hate to lose the girl’s baking, cleaning, and child-tending skills when the right young man took her fancy. But wasn’t that what life was about, raising children to give them confidence to make their own lives, separate from their parents, letting them fly off into the future, giving them courage to face the inevitable losses? What if some wanted to go to Oregon and some stay? Break up her family? She stopped mid-kneading. The crust would be tough if she didn’t calm down.

  Virgil had come in from the fields, followed by his son. Was that a twinkle in his eye?

  “Orus is back,” Virgil said.

  “You already knew?”

  “He stopped in the field after seeing Mrs. Brown. He looks fit. Slimmer but strong.” Her six living children moved around the log home as though in a dance, each knowing the steps that kept them from bumping into each other. That dance was all Pherne had ever hoped for as a young girl, to find the kind of love her parents had had, live a comfortable life surrounded by the things that brought her pleasure. Fine furniture. Jewelry. Books. And family, of course. She’d raise her children to be faithful and be kind to each other and their neighbors. Virgil had been the perfect choice. But now, disruption promised to raise its little head in the form of Orus Brown.

  Virgil led the prayer after they’d swarmed around the breakfast table, and together they all said, “Amen.” Pherne stood up to bring coffee to her husband. She turned and surveyed the scene. All she loved sat around that mahogany table, high-back chairs with carved harp-back design and arms (to help her mother push up out of the chair when she ate with them). Virgil had spared no expense to bring those luxury items on board ship to their Missouri home. What more could she ask for? She hoped they’d stay here forever.

  Her eye caught her husband’s as he passed the platter of biscuits. He winked at Pherne. She felt her face grow warm. She was pleased that Virgil had resisted Orus’s pressure to go west with him to explore two years previous. She needed to tell Virgil that and not let him ever wonder who she saw to be the head of her family: It was her husband and not her brother. Nor her mother, either. She meant to keep it that way.

  3

  Virgilia’s Hope

  Virgilia bent over the washbowl in her second-story bedroom. She wanted to clean up before heading to her cousins’ for this unexpected midweek outing. She could tell that her mother wasn’t happy. But her uncle Orus was a charmer and storyteller and he was back after two years. His stories would become legend. His idea of living offered adventurous possibilities. Her mother harbored the past and hanging on to things while Virgilia found excitement in the future . . . but wariness too. The unknown could frighten. Fiddlesticks. Let the future rule! She wanted to have a husband and family one day, find the perfect mate as her mother had, but she also thought there might be more to life than tending babies and cooking and cleaning and gardening. She supposed she read too many n
ovels and poems. But what had her mother expected? Her grandparents had started the St. Charles library and literary club. She was born to love books and stories and to think of the possibilities. Some of those stories spoke of faraway places, and the endings were always happy, weren’t they? Well, not always. The unknown roads ahead promised boulders and holes that could sink a soul.

  Virgilia undid the braids from the chignon that had rested on her neck so she could wash the sweat away with lavender-scented water. She ran her fingers through the amber waves that liked to tangle. She’d gotten the little girls dressed, and they stood outside awaiting the rest of the family. She brushed her hair, long strokes, the pull against her scalp a pleasant tingle. Much as she loved her younger brothers and sisters, she knew she didn’t want so many little hands and feet surrounding her days, asking questions, sparring and sulking. She had few moments to sit and read. She hadn’t had the luxury of working disagreements out with a big sister, being the oldest, and the boys—who were like triplets in their own world—didn’t include her. She’d been commissioned into adulthood before she was four, helping out every two years or so when another baby appeared. She was eleven when Oliver—number eight—was born. Dear Oliver. No new babies followed. Her mother’s childbirth sickness after Oliver meant even more care from Virgilia, given to her mother as well as her brothers and sisters. Thank goodness her grandmother had lived close by, and despite her limitations, her good nature and open heart gave Virgilia the strength to go on some days when she considered, well, just lying down and going to sleep, hoping she might never awaken.

  In the next room she could hear her brothers Albro, Octavius, and Clark’s low voices, and a wistfulness to have someone to share anticipation with ached in her chest. She’d like to find a friend with an ordinary first name like Nellie or Jane. Maybe because Brown was such a common name her grandmother had distinguished her three children with singularity: Orus, Manthano, Pherne. And her parents had continued the tradition despite Pringle being a distinctive surname in itself. Virgilia? For her father, she knew, but still. Why not Virginia?

  She pulled hair from the brush and stuffed it into the hole of the porcelain container. Winter would bring time to weave the amber with small beads, making pins and hair decorations for her sisters and herself. She tied a blue ribbon around thick-as-pudding hair, pushing curls from her forehead, then rubbed a dab of glycerin onto her cheeks to keep them moist. Her mother said she had a perfect widow’s peak, perfect blue eyes, and perfect skin, and that glycerin would keep it that way. Well, she tried. But the heat from the stove, the wind when she went out to milk the cow, and even the hot sun in summer when she shelled peas on the steps all worked to bring nubbins onto her face. It had gotten worse as she began her monthlies. They were miseries. Did every girl have such abominable abdominal pains? She laughed. She’d have to write that phrase down.

  A good friend, that’s what she wished for. She had a cousin. Young Pherne was a year younger than Virgilia, but she lived days away. They wrote letters sometimes, but it wasn’t the same as sharing chatter, anticipating her uncle Orus’s return. Would they go west? Would they separate after all these years of close living with cousins, or would they go as one large unit as the family had done heading to Missouri all those years before? She couldn’t imagine them all not going. Then she would have Young Pherne to share secrets with. Or maybe Judson Morrow who had smiled at her across the sanctuary of the First Methodist. But he was shy and hadn’t so much as said hello to her. And he was probably younger than she was, and no one knew where he’d come from or if he had family.

  “Virgilia?” Her mother’s voice followed a soft knock on the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve gotten a knot in my necklace and your father’s out at the wagon, waiting on us.” Her mother entered the room, her voice soft as a rabbit fur, soothing.

  Virgilia patted the seat next to her as she moved over on the bench. “Let’s see if we can get it untangled.” The gold felt cool against her fingers as she held the tiny chain. “Funny how it can get a knot in it while you’re wearing it when it goes on without it.”

  “Oh, it’s had that tangle for a while now. But today it annoyed me and then I couldn’t get it unclasped. I suppose I should have left it until this evening. Your father will start shouting at ‘his women’ to hurry up. I’m not sure what I’d do without you, Virgilia.”

  “You’d do fine. And one day, you won’t have me around. I hope. So enjoy it.”

  “That’s a long way off, I hope.”

  “You were young when you married Papa.”

  “Twenty-two. That’s old in some parts. But we found each other. In the library his parents started.” Her mother’s blue eyes glistened. “It’s surprising how paths cross and then one day you see something you never saw before. It’s like a bolt of lightning hits you and you wonder how you could have seen this man a dozen times and never noticed. There you are, in love.”

  “I can hardly wait, Mama. Here it is. All untangled.”

  “If only life offered such easy solutions.”

  “Pringle women, are you ready?” her father shouted, his deep voice lifting up the stairs through the summer heat.

  Virgilia leaned over the balcony. “Coming, Papa.” With an ivory stickpin, she held her thick blonde hair in a twist at the top of her head. She ran a bit of beet juice around her lips.

  “You’re only going to see your cousins,” her mother cautioned.

  “Orus is back telling stories. There’ll be a crowd. Maybe I’ll have one of those lightning moments, Mama. I want to look my best in case I get struck.”

  4

  Orus’s Report

  “So I says to him, ‘Shut up, White! Don’t beg like a baby.’ The Arapaho had tied our hands tight behind our backs, the rawhide cutting into our flesh.” Orus held his hands up, wrists together as though bound still. Tabby saw the scars and winced. “‘Where is your old village?’ I says to him. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’ That’s what I told those Indians. Stand up to ’em. That or die a coward.”

  “I wonder if you should tell such gory details, Husband,” Lavina said. “We have impressionable children here.”

  “They may as well know what we went through and how we endured. Life knocks you down, Wife. Browns learn how to spring back up.”

  Orus was in his glory, Tabby decided. All eyes upon him. He’d gathered all the family save Manthano, of course, and a couple dozen St. Charles citizens too. He reminded her, not of his father who was a great preacher and orator, but of his uncle John who would launch himself into seaside bars filled with drinking sailors and pontificate on the virtues of giving up the brew. He never wavered, though she doubted he ever won a convert to his teetotaling ways. She could see Orus’s audience had a few more who might be willing to head west, but the gory story he told now wouldn’t do much to entice the masses.

  “So White says to me, ‘You’ll anger them, Brown. Plead, that’s what I say.’ You all don’t know, but White was once appointed Indian agent in the West. He’s a doctor and maybe even a missionary, though I found a bit of his theology as warped as mine. Sorry, Marm.” He nodded to Tabby. “Anyway, the usually certain-of-all-things Dr. White traveled back with me to the States and at that moment he proved more of a burden than the equipment we’d packed onto our mules. When some of his bravado might be useful, the man was a sniveling fool.”

  “Orus.” This from Pherne. “That’s no way to talk about a man of the cloth.”

  “Phooey.” Orus waved his hand in dismissal of his sister’s words. He took over a room and now held all rapt, sitting at the plank tables under shading trees.

  “‘Indians respect confidence, boldness,’” I told White. “‘Keep your mouth shut and let me handle this,’ I tell him. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I still think—’ ‘Stop thinking!’ I said. I admit he sort of withered then, but sometimes a man’s intellect isn’t enough to get him through. It takes imagination and his body acting and u
nderstanding how another might see the world.”

  “Diplomacy was never your long suit, Brother Orus.” Virgil grinned after he spoke and the laughter died down. Orus seemed not to have heard, grabbing a drink of sassafras.

  Orus went on to tell how the men stumbled ahead of the Indians, who led his and White’s horses behind their own. It was late April and they’d made good time in that year of 1845. Orus had hoped to be home by early summer. But then they’d been ambushed by these five Indians, and Orus allowed himself a moment of regret that he hadn’t stood guard. He should have. This was his fault, but it was White’s too. “I share the blame,” he announced. “But White claimed to know all about Indians, so he should have seen the signs. What White contributed now was more trouble than help. What was done was done. A man comes to that place of knowing in a time of trouble.” They’d been on the trail east for weeks, seeing no Indians and spending a few nights with a cluster of wagons heading west. “One of those trains had a black woman carrying a baby with them. Seeking freedom. There’s that to be had in Oregon Territory, though not so much for colored folks.”

  “Will it be a free state?” someone asked. “Your Oregon.”

  “If it becomes a state and not a part of Britain first.” He turned back to his adoring audience. “So Doc White and I take letters from that and other wagons heading west. Then days passed before anyone else crossed our paths, and the prairie gave a wide vista to see miles ahead. Sunsets worthy of Michelangelo’s paints. We set our sails and figured free-sailing on to home. Forgive the sea talk, Marm.” Orus grinned.

  “You didn’t expect trouble then?” Virgil spoke as he poked a potato fingerling into a savory sauce. Lavina and Pherne had covered the planks with hams and fresh-fried catfish and potatoes in various forms.

  Orus shook his head. He reached for a peach, starting to eat from the bottom, a habit of his. “Back at Fort Hall, the soldiers spoke of small skirmishes, but things were described as calm. The soldiers told us that if we were headed east, the Indians weren’t likely to bother us. After all, we were escaping their country, not coming into it. Well, that didn’t work out as even a smidgeon of truth.”