“By way of Missouri,” John answered and Tabby turned to him. He was alert.
To the stranger, she said, “And you would be?”
“Reverend Roberts. Methodist. You and your wife and child looking for shelter, are you?”
“He’s my brother-in-law. And Nellie is our little changeling. And I’m a widow of a pastor myself. We do indeed seek shelter. Can you recommend a place that might take us? In exchange for work. We have nothing left but what’s on our backs here and our willing hands.” She held out her gloved palms.
He scratched at his chin, thinking.
Into his silence Tabby said, “So this is Salem. It isn’t much, now is it?”
“The Indians call it Chemeketa, a resting place, but the man who founded it called it Salem. It means—”
“Place of peace. I’m familiar with that name,” Tabby said. “We have one in Massachusetts too. Looks like the history of the East is being rewritten in the West.”
“And we transplants will keep on writing.”
“There are no people about,” Nellie said. “Where is everyone?”
“It’s Christmas Day, Child. They gathered last evening and will do so again this night.”
“Christmas Day.” Tabby sighed. “How good the Lord is to us to bring us out of the wilderness to be here on this day.”
“You’re welcome to board with me and mine until the Lord brings better things for you.”
“I think he already has.”
28
The Hearth of Her Heart
Pherne hated not having her own things. She hated feeling weak and strained bringing her family into the mix of others who were less prosperous than the Pringles had been when they left Missouri. They’d arrived like babes, with nothing to offer but a willingness to work for food. Clark, nearly seventeen, along with Octavius and Albro, slept at the livery. The boys would help muck out stalls and oil harnesses in return for food. Pherne, Virgil, and the girls had been taken in by a kindly couple with four children of their own. Pherne helped prepare meager meals, though having bread at each one felt like a feast twice a day. On top of feeling her own strain, she worried over Virgil, who carried the weight of it all on his shoulders and still suffered from the ague. Thank goodness they had the cows. They could trade something for the kindnesses of strangers now that the animals could graze on the abundant grasses that swept like a green skirt toward the copse of trees beyond the town.
Her mother’s party had found help from the Methodist minister, just as she’d said she would. The woman never ceased to amaze Pherne in how she put out her prayers, precise and certain. And good things appeared. It was one reason why she’d finally relented in sending her and Uncle John ahead those days. Her mother seemed indestructible. Pherne wished she was.
“First thing I’ll ride to Oregon City and file on a claim.” Virgil spoke from the loft bed they’d been given by a family named Matthews. Virgilia, Sarelia, and Emma slept on the floor. “When we rode out yesterday, Matthews showed me parcels of good ground not yet claimed. Extraordinary ground.” Virgil went silent as he dressed, then chuckled. “I bet we could plant your mother’s walking stick in the ground in this country and it would grow into a tree.”
“That fertile?”
“That fertile.” He finished pulling on his brogans, sat and caught his breath, then twisted back to her as she leaned against the headboard, her hair brushing the ceiling angle. She could see her breath, it was so cold, but the loft was dry, and being dry counted for everything. “I know this isn’t what you hoped for. Me neither. But it’ll get better. I promise you that.”
“I’m not blaming you, Virgil. I know you’ve done the best you can.”
“And so have you. Oh, Phernie, I hate seeing you like this. The boys and I will get a cabin built as soon as we can.”
“I know you will.”
Virgil stood. “Promise me you’ll try to see your mother today. I know she can be a trial, but you always seem cheered after you’ve been with her.”
Cheered? Maybe so. “Right after I feel terrible that I’m so woeful while she who has less than anyone can be so stalwart.” She whispered then, “I actually sometimes resent her.”
He laughed. “Envy takes its toll. But think of it this way: some of her undaunted courage rubbed off on you, Pherne Pringle. Or you wouldn’t have carried your finest possessions on your head slogging through Canyon Creek. And you wouldn’t have raised good, strong boys who will help build up our land and get their own when they turn twenty-one.” She sank back down under the feather comforter. “Nor given us girls who will one day make wives as good as their mother, looking after children of their own.”
“You make me sound like a saint.”
“And so you are.”
“I don’t feel like one. I don’t feel much at all except sadness. And I should feel grateful that we all survived when so many didn’t. I feel guilty a bit.”
He bent to kiss her then. “See your mother. I doubt she ever does.”
Tabby began a new chapter in her memoir. They’d survived, arrived, and now had to discover what God intended next.
The glebe—or parsonage, as the reverend called it—consisted of a moss-covered cabin with a shake roof, a small outbuilding to house the reverend’s horse and a pig that one of his parishioners had given him for providing a marriage service. Wood stacked against it fed the fireplace. A young man wielded an ax against the chopping block while Captain John watched. He leaned against his cane.
Nellie carried an armful of split wood inside, laying each log from her arms beside the open hearth. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see a fireplace inside a house.” Nellie brushed her arms of the bark and bit of green moss that stuck to her shawl. She stood with her palms against the coals that Tabby poked with the iron before she added one of the logs.
“Dry firewood. What a luxury.” Flames danced before Tabby’s eyes. The reverend and his wife slept in the loft, having given their bed to Tabby and Nellie, and made a pallet for John on the ground floor. The reverend, perhaps in his forties, feared Tabby couldn’t make the ladder. And she couldn’t. Still, putting a man and his wife out of their bed gave Tabby pause.
The young man who’d chopped the wood, Fabritus Smith, slept in that small barn and took his meals, such as they were, with them. He was from New York and nearly twenty-one when he could claim land. He’d arrived by wagon along the Columbia, and Reverend Roberts had taken him in as well. There were many mouths to feed. Perhaps this was to be her purpose in this new land: to find ways to return the favor of the reverend in giving them shelter, maybe even passing such generosity along.
One early January morning, Tabby set praying hands across her chest and announced to Nellie before leaving their bed, “We need to find a way to return our room and board. I have a plan.”
Nellie rolled toward Tabby and whispered, “Mrs. Roberts isn’t much of a cook or housekeeper, is she, Mrs. Brown?”
“How about you call me ‘Mother Brown.’ I think we’re close enough, don’t you.” Nellie giggled. “This is a new chapter in our lives. We’re truly family now.” Then returning to Nellie’s earlier remark, she said, “But we mustn’t criticize the reverend’s wife, Child.”
Still, Tabby had thought the same thing in less-kind words. Mary was a pitiful thing. “Ignorant and useless as a heathen goddess.” She’d have to scratch that out in her memoir. The story she told herself should never malign another. Still, she had evidence daily of the woman’s failings. The mahogany table fine enough for a governor’s house was caked with bits of food Mary had failed to wipe up after eating. Mary served sparse fare. Porridge, stuck to the tabletop, as that was what they’d been served at each meal along with pieces of pemmican. No dried fruit, yet Tabby had seen bushes along the way that promised berries. No milk, as they had no cows. From their first days there, Tabby realized the floor wasn’t daily swept. Mice droppings clustered in the corners. The feather tick lay matted and dusty with old gras
s. Tabby hoped when spring came and Virgil returned to the wagons that her own bedding would be salvageable. Meanwhile she had offered to wash the ticking and see if they could find dry hay or something better to stuff the bedding with. The reverend had clasped her hand with both of his, eyes shining in gratitude. “You are a gift.”
Tabby didn’t feel like a gift, taking and not giving back, at least as much as she wanted and felt was required of a guest. Maybe it was time to behave as someone different than a guest.
“How long have you been here?” Tabby asked as she swept the floor before breaking their fast.
“My mother cried when I married and came here on the vessel Lausanne,” Mary said. “We were part of the Great Reinforcement to the Methodist Mission to the Indians. It wasn’t far from here.” Mary pointed. “She was certain the wilds would consume me. The mission closed three years later and our little school for the missionary children closed with it. I came to teach and now I have nothing to do.” She sighed. “Now we live off the goodness of our neighbors, the gods of misfortune pounding on our heads.” She wiped her eyes with her apron, something she did frequently, whether from habit or truly from her misery.
“You have a good home.” Self-pity bothered Tabby, whether in another or herself. The morning prayer she had added was “Help me to be what you would have me be, do what you would have me do.” She spoke that now in silence.
“May I?” Tabby asked Mary later that morning as they stood before the larder. “I’ve a great desire for fresh bread.”
“We have none of that. I wouldn’t know what to do with flour.”
Tabby shook her head. At least Beatrice had a feast with worms and bugs aplenty.
They’d been at the parsonage for a week. The reverend would soon be leaving to serve his people up and down the river, he’d told her, and she and Nellie and John were welcome to stay for as long as they needed. But staying with them felt like being caught in a river eddy, moving but not going anywhere. Was this God’s purpose for having kept her alive? The Lord knows my lot. He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places. The psalm came to her and she savored it.
“I found this, Mother Brown.” Nellie had returned to the barn, spent a little time talking with the boarder Fabritus Smith, then came inside and handed her an egg. “Beatrice is laying eggs again.”
“Excellent! Where are my gloves? I’m going to take that egg and find us some cornmeal. You stay here and mix up the porridge. Young Smith will need something after his wood chopping.”
“He’s a handsome young man.”
Tabby stopped her activity and squinted, hearing a new tone in Nellie’s voice. “So he is.”
It hadn’t been long since Judson left. Maybe Nellie had found a path to her future without him—and without Tabby’s help at all. All the more reason for Tabby to take the next step toward the independence she was sure God intended for her.
Virgilia rose early and walked. She walked down the narrow boardwalk into town. She stepped out of the way of passing carts and walked down an alley marked by potato peels and watermelon rinds rotting in the wet. She made her way toward the river and watched it rush by. She didn’t know where she was going. She felt as adrift as a tree branch floating by, bouncing off the shoreline as though hoping it would stick somewhere, then back out into the current rushing into the unknown. Gramo had said she should pray for her future, that God listened. But what to pray for? They’d survived, all of them, fortunate indeed to have been one of the first wagons through the canyon, as there were still people stuck out there. Destitute, with new relief parties heading their way. She had no way to help, nothing to send to those still struggling. She’d heard that Mr. Scott had met up with the Applegates and expressed “words” with the brothers about having deserted them. The Applegates were surprised, as they thought enough men would have been able to cut through the worst of it and assumed Scott knew the way, having been through there. Yes, they might have marked the trail better, but the emigrants ought to have had little trouble, they surmised.
Little trouble. Virgilia rarely allowed herself to remember the horrors, the deaths and burials, the injuries, cuts that infected and them with no salves for cures. Her brother sent off alone to find food. Her father doing the same. Cattle lost to Indian arrows. Buddy weak. And the fear that shivered her the day her gramo and Uncle John rode off. Their leaving so the others would have more food was a sacrifice, and it helped her see how precious life was and that her family had a pattern of giving of themselves for others.
The more recent parting also saddened her. Judson had gone with her uncle Orus, and only then had she allowed herself to be upset with Nellie. It wasn’t jealousy of Nellie and Judson having found love, she knew that now. Once she had shamefully confessed to her gramo that she was envious. Her gramo’s reply was, “Envy is the crumb that falls from the feast of a table God has prepared for us, Child. You don’t want to waste time with crumbs—seek the feast.” Judson had been an infatuation, a word found in one of her novels. He’d been more like a younger brother than a beau. She could see that now. But she had enjoyed talking with him, being his friend—until Nellie came along. She had admired Nellie’s boldness and asking for what she wanted, for setting her own sails, as Uncle John would call it. But after Nellie was separated from her family, Virgilia found herself taking care of Nellie. It had seemed right to do that; it had also been hard, something Virgilia had failed to acknowledge until now. Feeling what others felt, hoping to cheer them, well, that proved tiring. Maybe she could sympathize, care, assist others in expressing their sadness, but not take the sorrow of others into herself. “Give sorrow words,” Shakespeare had written. That was a better action for comforting others: help them find healing words. Nellie would need that now too, Virgilia imagined, with Judson having left her behind.
Her feet had taken her to the glebe or parsonage, Gramo called it, reminding her that they would all find a new way to call things here in the West. She said it was next to the church.
“Your gramo isn’t back from the mercantile yet.” Nellie greeted her with a warm embrace. “I’ve missed you.”
“How are things here?” Virgilia looked around. “You seem cheered.”
“I am.” Nellie returned to the fireplace where she stirred the large black pot. “I’m making porridge for Mr. Smith.”
“I thought the reverend’s name was Roberts?”
“It is. But he has another boarder. Fabritus Smith. Isn’t that an odd name?”
“He’d fit right in with my family. I’ve often wondered why Gramo named her children with such unique names or spellings. I mean, why not Fern, spelling it like the plant instead of P-h-e-r-n-e? And Uncle Orus? Manthano?”
“Octavius. Albro. Sarelia.”
“Virgilia.” Virgilia giggled. “I have to meet this Fabritus. I bet there’s a story to tell there with that kind of name.”
“Carel Fabritius.” A baritone voice spoke. “He was considered one of Rembrandt’s most promising pupils.” Virgilia swirled to face the voice that would change her life forever. He held an armful of wood. “That’s the story of my name. And my mother’s misspelling of his name for mine, leaving out an i. And the fact that Carel Fabritius died quite young in an explosion of a Dutch gunpowder magazine that burned down half of Delft and consumed nearly all of his paintings, the Raising of Lazarus being one of his best known.” He nodded and she saw the wet drops of moisture on his dark hair. He wore a smile that sent the promise of a feast straight to her heart. “Happy to make your acquaintance, Miss—”
“Pringle. Virgilia Pringle. I didn’t mean to make fun of your name. I—”
“If I had a farthing for every time someone has commented on my name, I’d be a wealthy man.” He smiled at her and she felt filled in the way eating bread after those days of famine had restored her hope. “Virgilia? That’s a unique name.” The deepness of his voice and his brown eyes warmed Virgilia to her toes.
“I’m named after my father, and he was na
med after Virgil, the poet who celebrated the founder of Rome, among other great works.”
“In the Aeneid. I’ve read it.” He squatted and placed the wood next to the hearth. Leaning toward the cooking pot, he inhaled. “Smells good, Nellie.”
“Mr. Smith is looking for land,” Nellie said. “I might ride out with him if your gramo approves. And if he asks me to, of course.” She winked at Virgilia behind Fabritus’s back.
“That’s why I came out here from New York, for the free land where a man can let nature be his foundation.”
“My mother is an artist. Fabritius painted The Goldfinch, didn’t he? It survived that fire.”
“You know about that?” Fabritus looked up at Virgilia. “It was painted the year he died, 1654.” His gaze meant a squeezing of her heart.
“I think your Fabritius the painter would be pleased you find nurture in rivers and trees.”
He rose from the hearth, brushed wood debris from his duck pants. His comfort at the fireplace caused her to speak without thinking. “Did you know that we receive the English word focus from the first-century word for hearth. Because it’s the center of the home.” She blushed.
“Where people were fed, shared their lives, all things of import happened there.”
“You love the meaning of words too.”
He nodded. “And it’s where the heat is, at the hearth. The farther you get from the heat, the colder things get. I intend to keep fires burning in my life.”
Virgilia swallowed. Nellie had faded into the logs, only she and Fabritus filled the room. “The hearth is the center, the focus.”
“Hey, I’m still here.” Nellie shook her hand between the two.
A log crackled. Then, “Where is your father, Virgilia Pringle? I want to ask his permission to take you along on my search for property. If you’d like to go.”
Go or stay?
She remembered Nellie’s earlier admission, the importance of sacrificing for others. But a voice inside her told her it was all right to pluck this plum from the tree. “Nellie, would you mind?”