This Road We Traveled

  “You can carry on in St. Charles as you have all these years now. You never wanted to join me here.”

  “I didn’t know I was welcome.”

  “Marm,” he’d said, using a word Virgilia had only heard her uncle Orus use for her gramo. Virgilia felt a bit uneasy listening at the door of her uncle’s office, but she wanted to know, wanted to be able to comfort her gramo when this was all over and they headed back home. Which she hoped would be soon.

  Virgilia didn’t like the way her aunt Catherine looked, heavy with child, waddling, holding her back; nor the pinched looks on her face when Oregon was discussed. Her slaves worked hard so Catherine didn’t have to during this waiting time, but Virgilia’s cousin Pherne no longer lived there and Virgilia suspected that daughter had brought the greatest support to her stepmother, being the oldest. She hoped the baby wouldn’t arrive before they left. But she also wished they could leave, because she thought that their being there was a strain Catherine didn’t need.

  She told Gramo as much as they crawled into the large featherbeds in the room they shared. The house was so large her cousins hadn’t even had to give up their beds for guests. Manthano had a room just for visitors to use. Virgilia appreciated being treated as an adult and given the bed space, but she also knew how hard it was when visitors came—at least at her house it was hard. “I think we should leave tomorrow, Gramo.”

  “Why, whatever for? We’ve just arrived.”

  “Catherine looks so tired, and what if she has the baby early because of the stress of our being here?”

  “Fiddlesticks. She’s had three babies already.”

  “They get harder with each one though, isn’t that true?”

  “Is it? No one knows, Child.” Tabby sighed, pressed the covers over her stomach, clasped her hands in prelude to her prayers. “That’s kind thinking on your part and I admire you for it. We can’t leave before I try to convince Manthano to let me travel with his family, but he’s as stubborn as Orus. You help out as much as you can. We’ll make our way and take the stage home in a few days. About the time we get our trunks delivered.”

  “They’re here, Gramo. Tom brought them from the stage stop. I brought Beatrice’s cage up.” She pointed toward the veranda where the bird squatted in apparent comfort.

  “Oh, I know. I was being cynical. Not a good thing to be at all.”

  In the morning, Virgilia performed the work she did at home, learning a few additions and subtractions from the way her aunt Catherine said to do a thing. They changed their aprons daily at this place, as their slaves washed laundry twice a week. Here the Browns didn’t have to do the heavy laundering, heating all that water, using up the soap. The hams at Manthano’s were cured differently too, with a hint of an herb she wasn’t familiar with. Her cousins had a cyclone cellar where they kept dried foods and blankets, and water from a spring not far from where they had the house. Virgilia had never witnessed a cyclone and hoped she never would, but she liked the idea of having a safe place to go. Where they lived, the basement served as a cyclone cellar, not a separate stone house dug into the side of the hill. They had to worry about flooding in St. Charles; something the Manthano clan could forget, living on top of a high hill.

  “Always check before you go in, looking for snakes,” her cousin Mary had warned as she showed Virgilia the cellar. “They like the cool too. I usually have one of our slaves go in first.” Mary spoke with authority even though she was younger, and Virgilia was startled by how Mary ordered adults around.

  Snakes. She’d have to ask her uncle Orus about snakes in Oregon.

  This Brown family was already busy preserving meat, drying foods, making sure they had sturdy wagons so they’d be ready in the spring. Virgilia supposed that if the decision for her family to leave Missouri was made while she and her gramo were at Vibbard, that her family, too, would be busy making preparations. She should get home to help them, but convincing her gramo to leave sooner than she intended was like pulling a bone from their dog Buddy. It just made him hang on tighter.

  “Are you looking forward to going?” Virgilia asked Mary while the girls played Draughts that second evening. She moved the small colored bones across the board of black-and-red-colored blocks.

  “I think so. I don’t know.”

  She concentrated on the board. “I crossed over your bone so I get to have it, right?”

  Mary nodded and picked up the board piece, handing it to Virgilia.

  “I haven’t played this game before.”

  “It’s easy. I’m going to take it with me in the wagon.”

  “Will you be allowed to take playthings?” All the talk from her uncle Orus had been about essentials, necessities, requirements.

  “I don’t know if we’re allowed, but I sure enough will.”

  “Spoken like a true Brown.” Both girls laughed. “Then I will too. If we go.” Though Virgilia had no idea what plaything she might take. She wasn’t musical but wondered if someone would bring a violin. Her mother would bring her pencils and drawing papers—though she hadn’t drawn anything since Oliver’s death. Virgilia had so little time to herself she wasn’t sure she knew how to be frivolous, but she liked the idea of trying to find something that mattered that she could take. She’d be sure to take the pewter icing knife. Surely she’d be able to bake cakes.

  Virgil Pringle rode to Western House, the gathering tavern in St. Charles. Orus spoke there often, prodding people west. Even when Orus wasn’t present, Virgil brought back news about consequences of bank failures of a few years previous, the current drop in hemp prices, dissension in Congress about slaves, and, of course, Oregon. When he arrived home, he had stars in his eyes and not just reflections from the heavens. He spoke of ordering a Peter Schuttler wagon from Chicago, delivered to St. Louis where he and Orus and sons could assemble the green box and attach the bright red wheels. He came home passionate—that was the only word Pherne Pringle could think of to describe the enthusiasm, the delight, the excitement he espoused. It was as though he’d fallen in love. It hadn’t taken very long. Pherne wished her mother and Virgilia were back so she could talk with her mother about it, find out how Virgilia felt about heading west. She felt like an island in the Missouri with the river channels passing her by, carrying her family away.

  “It’s going to be extraordinary, Phernie. So much enthusiasm, even without Orus carrying on at Western House.” He hung his hat on the rack by the door. The children were upstairs in their beds.

  “It’s been decided then?” Pherne sat at her spinning wheel, the threads warming her fingers.

  Confusion narrowed his eyebrows. “We discussed it.”

  “We did discuss it and I gave out a number of reasons not to go.”

  “And I addressed them.”

  “I didn’t hear myself convinced.”

  “Pherne, it’s the greatest adventure of our lives. Can’t you see that? Beginning anew.”

  “Where—” She tried to find the words that had escaped her as she’d watched her husband’s interests turn west these weeks. “Where do I fit in to your . . . adventurous passions?”

  He frowned. Moonlight shadowed his strong jaw. “Truth is, you don’t fit in.”

  She felt herself sinking at hearing her greatest fear spoken aloud. Dear Lord, how would she go on alone?

  He lifted her hands from her work then and took her in his arms. He stroked the back of her head as tears of loss seeped from her eyes. She smelled leather and sweat.

  “You don’t fit in, Phernie, because you are my everything, don’t you know that? I’m doing this as I’ve done everything, for you. For our family.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed that, but she believed that he did. She let him hold her, each with silent prayers upon their breaths. His assurance was enough to turn her face to his and take the next step toward accepting that they would go.

  8

  Choices

  “John?”

  “Hello, dear Tabitha.” The tallis
h man tipped his bowler hat, clasped his age-spotted hands over his ivory-knobbed cane. “And you must be Virgilia. I’m your uncle John. No, your great-uncle, your grandfather’s brother.”

  They’d just gotten off of the stage in St. Charles, returning from Manthano’s. John could have tipped Tabby over with one of Beatrice’s tail feathers, she was so discombobulated to find him standing there.

  He turned to Tabby. “You look tidy and fit and, may I add, as beautiful as ever.”

  No one had called her beautiful in twenty-eight years. She knew it wasn’t true, but the compliment washed over her like warm bathwater anyway.

  “Tidy and fit? Well, my children don’t see that. They see me as old and lame. What are you doing here?” She had not seen John for maybe . . . fifteen years. He’d visited once after she’d dragged her boys kicking and screaming from the sea John loved. She hadn’t been all that happy to see him then, still holding him accountable for his stories luring her sons like Odysseus’s sirens to the sea.

  What was he, twelve years older than she was? Yes, she was born in 1780 and he was born in . . . 1768, making him seventy-seven—soon to be seventy-eight. If she remembered, his birthday was close to All Saints’ Day. Despite his age, John cut a fine swath in the fall scene. Snow-white hair, a black suit with green tapestry vest, and a fine round-topped hat. When he smiled, his coal-black eyes smiled too. Tabby remembered that cane, the one he’d gotten in the Orient with an ivory handle. After his ship had wrecked and he’d been rescued by the French. She wasn’t sure he needed it, but it added to his finished fashion.

  “Old and lame? Nonsense. Children don’t always see things as we elders do.” He pointed his cane toward Virgilia and winked.

  “You’re an elder now,” Tabby said.

  His black eyes sparkled. “We must claim any advantage we can, Tabby. It is good to see you.” He brushed his lips over the top of her gloved hands he’d lifted, then grinned down at her and held her gaze. He had Clark’s eyes and even his deep voice, but he was more flamboyant than her husband had ever been, liked finer things, too, while Clark had eschewed pomp.

  The clerk lifted their trunk onto the wagon that John had apparently driven. The horses stomped and swished at flies.

  “What are you doing here? Have you been commissioned by my son to look after me while they desert me and head west?”

  “It would be my pleasure to take care of you.” He said it with a timbre that brought throat-clearing to Tabby.

  “You must be between ships.”

  “I am. But I may be ready to start a new phase of my life—shipless but seeking a new mate, perhaps.” He smiled as he said this and she could smell his cologne. The same kind Clark had worn. Did he always share that choice? What is happening here?

  Beatrice clucked in the cage as Virgilia placed it on the wagon bed. “Gramo, Uncle . . .”

  “Oh, yes, let’s get us home and we can talk then,” Tabby said. “So many stories you have to tell of your exploits, I’m sure.” She pulled away from his fingers, gripped her walking stick with both hands.

  John helped Tabby up, then Virgilia. “How did you find Manthano then?”

  “Busy packing for Oregon. They’re all going, John. Unless Virgil stays?”

  John shook his head. “Arranging going on at the Pringles as well. That’s where I’m abiding, by the way. It wouldn’t be respectable to house with a single, attractive widow woman such as you.”

  “You’re family, John. Goodness. And do my children have you remaining with me while they head off to Oregon? You haven’t really said.”

  He leaned toward her. “I did in fact receive a letter some weeks back suggesting such a thing. But I thought I might offer an alternative. Maybe it’s time we considered making that family designation more formal.”

  Tabby’s mouth went dry. She forced a laugh. “You always were a character, Brother Brown. Let’s not distress the young mind of Virgilia here with such talk. She’s managing enough change.” She patted Virgilia’s knee. She placed her walking stick between them on the seat. As good a barrier as she could imagine until she could make sense of this unexpected arrival.

  On the ride home, Virgilia chattered with John, giving Tabby time to think about this man on the other side of her walking stick. The breeze picked up the ties from her cap and they tickled her neck. She hadn’t had such a compliment about her person for years. Beautiful? At her age? With her crooked body and wrinkled face? There’d been a few suitors after Clark died, but most faded away with three children to tend and a strong-willed woman directing them and any potential stepparent. It made her miss Clark more. He’d known her faults and foibles and loved her anyway. Did John see her faults? She’d known him almost as long as she’d known Clark. But he was so different than her husband. Still, given her years and miles? And his?

  Once at her home, John helped her into her cabin, dragged the trunk in with Virgilia’s pushing, then tipped his hat. He held her hand softly once more.

  “Think about it, Tabby. We could start a whole new life together here. What an adventure.”

  She was thinking with more than a little trepidation.

  Virgilia prattled on about her visit until her little sisters rolled their eyes and her brothers gestured as though they sewed threads through their lips. “I know you want me to be quiet, but it’s going to be exciting. And now that Uncle John is staying behind with Gramo, I won’t worry about her. I can get excited about the journey.”

  “Get excited with a little less noise,” Albro told her.

  “Doesn’t bother me.” Clark made a long reach with his fork to pick up the last sausage on the platter. “She can talk all she wants about Oregon, but it won’t be what you think it will be. It never is. You set a goal, but the lessons, well, they happen while you’re on the trail. Might even be the whole point of a journey, what happens along the way.” He chewed and looked at her, used his fork to point then. “You have a tendency to have short-lived excitement, Sister. As soon as you hit a little barrier, you sink like a rock in the pond.”

  “I do not!”

  “You do. This trip will require staying power, won’t it, Papa.”

  “It will.”

  Virgilia pouted. Yes, she had once agreed to work at a neighbor’s when the woman of the house took ill, and she’d only lasted three days. The children were demanding, the husband of no help, and they expected her to cook, clean, and tend the ill woman. Three days was all she could take. “You’re very philosophical. Thank you, dear brother. But I am truthfully looking forward to all the new people I’ll meet, viewing new landscapes, baking cakes with different flour. And I won’t have the daily drudgery. I mean daily chores. Sorry, Mama, I didn’t mean to complain.”

  But Virgilia did see the daily work as drudgery, and the prospect of having to find new ways to do things living out of a wagon intrigued her, if it didn’t her mother. They’d been incorporating new activities to get ready. Drying food, making tons and tons of bacon, preparing pemmican as Orus said to do it. Knitting extra socks, sewing wool dresses and wrappers, two for each girl, and new duck pants for the men or maybe pantaloons for summer months of travel. Candles. Candles and more candles and lanterns. All the excitement was perfect for Virgilia. Added to that was the hope that Judson Morrow would be hired to help manage one of the ox teams along with her brothers. That would be the perfect ending to a dream even before her journey began.

  She would think, though, about what Clark had said. She might need to be cautious about hoping for too much. Still, she resented his assertion that she lacked the ability to continue to persevere in the face of trouble. Her gramo was her model. If she could endure through hard times and face the pain of being left behind, she, Virgilia, could surely face whatever life had to offer her ahead.

  “It isn’t decided yet,” Pherne told them all then. Heads turned with shocked looks on her brothers’ faces. “I may stay behind and insist that your father return to get me and the girls after he’s built us
a home and we’ll have a proper place to live.”

  The general chorus of complaints came from the boys as much as the girls. After all, they’d have to do their own cooking and washing if the boys went on without their mother and the girls.

  “Well,” Virgilia told them, “it seems there might be a fly in your butter, boys. How will you adapt?”

  Their voices rose toward their father to insist and plead with their mother. Virgilia was being smart, she knew, while her heart pounded at the possibility that her father and the boys might leave them behind.

  Tabby served John her special pudding of plums with fresh cream slurried with sugar. He had a sweet tooth, had ever since he’d stopped consuming spirits. It had only been a few days since their return from Manthano’s, and he’d come by each morning to tell stories and offer to chop wood or pound a loose nail to tighten the porch steps. She’d hardly had a chance to write in her memoir. He was good company though. She laughed more than she had since before Clark’s death, and the idea of being left behind had eased into another possibility. Still, her mind made plans.

  “I have a proposition for you, John.”

  “Good. What shall it be? A willingness to take me in at last? To see what the Lord might have in mind for these old Browns while the young ones plod west?”

  “Not exactly. What would you think about our teaming up—”

  “My thoughts exactly.” He clapped his hands. “Wonderful, Tabby. Wonderful!” He stood and put his arms out as though opening his heart. “There is nothing more that I want at this point in my life than to team up and take care of you.”

  “Yes. Well. No, not exactly . . . that.” She gripped her walking stick, held up her palm to stop him from moving toward her. “Eat your pudding and let me finish.” The entire countenance of his face dropped. She meant to cheer him, not discourage. “What would you think about our teaming up with our own wagon and going west with the ‘young ones,’ as you call them.” There, she’d said it. Out loud, it sounded a little hollow, but in her prayers it made perfect sense.