Something Worth Doing Read online

  “I’m going to visit Shirley,” she told Ben. “The air in San Francisco will perk me up. Should I take Earl with me?”

  “Leave him be. He’s getting into a routine here. And he’s a good help to me. Reminds me of things.”

  She felt a tinge of guilt but slipped over it. Clara Belle had been buried, and Don had returned to Washougal, reluctantly leaving Earl behind.

  “It’s nothing out of the ordinary, Don.” Abigail had tugged at her black neck scarf. “We’ve had nieces and nephews and the sons of friends stay with us for a time. You’d have to hire a nanny or someone to look after him. Visit anytime.”

  Defeated, Don had left his son behind.

  “I asked Earl to remind you to put your coat on in the evening.” Abigail washed an ink stain from her fingers as she spoke to Ben. A dove cooed in the elm tree.

  “Oh, yes, he does that. But he also notices if I’ve already eaten a bowl of mush when I ask Chen why he hasn’t gotten breakfast out for us yet.” Ben chuckled. “Craziest thing.” He shook his head. “I guess food doesn’t taste all that good if I can’t remember that I just ate it.”

  Shirley welcomed her, and Abigail felt the greatest comfort in the arms of an old friend who had lived a lifetime with another kind of lost child. She and her husband Eloi had children together, but her eldest daughter—now grown with children of her own—was still the heart-child. That girl, taken from her by the legal system, had given Shirley direction toward helping women seek their rights in divorces they had not wanted and been unjustly granted. Eloi, with his dark hair and gentle eyes, would put his arm around Shirley as they talked, a gesture of protection.

  “Clara Belle’s last words were that I needed to get back into the fight. She said she was going on ahead and that I had work to do here. But I’m not sure how to do it now.”

  “It’ll come to you, Jenny. You’re in an understandable slump. Such a disappointment to you—Clara Belle’s death, losing that vote.”

  “It was. But I snapped back, or so I thought. And then encountered the tension back east that doesn’t appear to be going away. I seem to be the crux of the contention. My outspoken views at the conventions about us not lining up with prohibitionists. And then my writings.”

  “Maybe you should do what you always wanted to do and just write your poems and novels.”

  “I can’t support myself on that.”

  “You could sell the New Northwest.”

  She stood thoughtful, the waning sun sending glittering reddish light across the bay. “But how would I carry on the mission that Clara Belle wanted for me?”

  “Edit someone else’s newspaper. Kate’s doing that. Write for someone else, earn a salary.”

  “Oh my, who would hire this outspoken old woman?” The friends laughed.

  “You’re not old.”

  “But I am outspoken.”

  “It’s who you are. You’re a reformer, Jenny. An activist. You see injustice and must act on that. The way you do it can change through the years. With less stress from the newspaper, you could give more time to your speaking and even publish a collection of your speeches, to inspire others to keep the faith. What is it you always say—‘the world is moving and women are moving with it’? We just move differently, to adapt to the times.”

  Shirley’s words formed a knot at the end of a thread that Abigail could imagine pulling through a new cloth.

  “I’d have to talk to the boys. And Ben, of course. He talks about Idaho and the Lost Valley. It is beautiful country, and with water, we might grow crops. I convinced him that if I could write in a dusty stagecoach stop, I could surely write in a cabin shadowed by mountains while streams rushed nearby.” She’d even thought it might become a gathering place for campaigns. Perhaps offer refuge for women and children in need, but she didn’t think Ben would go for that. Is that the way my mission to elevate women will take now? I’ll advance the place of women in public life by retreating into a wilderness? Her prayers asked for guidance.

  She called a family gathering as soon as she returned to Portland.

  “What would you do, Ma?”

  “Why, find a ranch in Idaho, as you boys and Ben have been touting for some time now. We could all move there. I’d find my little ‘lodge in the wilderness’ and write. I could be a correspondent to the new buyer, and Idaho still doesn’t have the vote. Yet. They could use me. And of course, I can travel back here, stay with Kate or Harriet or Fanny or Sarah Maria. Goodness, what’s the benefit of all those sisters if one can’t impose upon them from time to time—not to mention nieces and nephews.”

  “Earl would like it, though I doubt Stearns would,” Hubert said.

  “Should we tell her, Pa?” Clyde asked. Her second youngest son was sixteen already. He had a beard. How had her boys grown up without her noticing?

  “Tell me what?”

  “We’ve already found a place that Pa likes. I like it too,” Ralph told her. “Hubert took him last week.”

  So that’s why the Idaho images were so readily available to Ben.

  “We were trying to figure out how to buy it, but now, if we sell the paper, we could do that.” Hubert added, “We boys made a down payment on it.”

  “You bought something without my even agreeing to it? Not knowing if you could pay for it?” Encumbering me? “Ben?” What has happened to our partnership? “When were you going to let me know?”

  “I quit the customhouse, Jenny. It was time. I couldn’t . . . well, I forgot important things.”

  Like telling me you’d resigned.

  “Earl and Hubert and me, we went to Idaho. You were traveling like you do.” He grinned. “I didn’t take your teapot money, Jenny.”

  Shame washed over her. She hadn’t been aware that Ben’s problems had become severe enough that he had recognized his need to quit work. They hadn’t even discussed it. As usual, she had been so involved in her own world afar that she hadn’t seen what was happening nearby.

  Yes, Clara Belle’s death had come during that time, and travel had been a way of her grieving. But Ben grieved too.

  “Oh, Ben. I . . . you could have telegraphed me at Shirley’s. I would have come home.”

  “You needed your time there. You always come back with new ideas. And it happened.” He looked around the room at their sons and Earl. “Where’s Cora? She always fixes my evening cocoa.”

  “It’s not night yet, Grandpa.” Earl eased up beside Ben.

  They’ve moved on without me.

  The swirl of getting the books in order filled her time: deciding whether to sell the presses separately or give a credit knowing new ones might be warranted. Deciding whether to put the house on the market too, how to let subscribers know about the changes. When she’d had any second thoughts about the sale of her work for the past sixteen years, the enthusiasm with which her sons were willing to divest of it kept her from being tearful. Even changes that resulted in things one wished for could carry heartbreak, she decided. At least Clara Belle didn’t have to see that her beloved Washington had repealed the woman’s vote when the Territorial Legislature found it unconstitutional. What had Shirley said when she pierced Abigail’s ears? “Pain comes before the glory.” She’d felt that when they left Hardscrabble Farm and when she sold the school and millinery. As with her other losses, she would grieve in time. And maybe these back-to-back devastations with Clara’s passing and the voting loss, perhaps in order to move forward, one needed things so upending.

  With Ben, Wilke, Earl, and Hubert, they traveled to the Wood River district, east to Idaho. The land the boys had found for Ben had a large log cabin on it, with several bedrooms and a wide porch that wrapped around the house, offering a vista of green and snowcapped mountains they called the Lost River Range. It was in the Pashimeroi Valley. They’d made a good purchase. The expanse caused her to take in deep breaths. This would be a healing place; she could feel it.

  “What would you say about using the bunkhouse to house women and chil
dren in need? We could perhaps start a utopian community like the Aurora colony, where all are equal and—”

  “Ma. No,” Wilke said. He put his hand up to stop her. “This is our place, not the whole world’s.”

  Yes, this would be a space to get away from the world, to stop rehashing the arguments at National, put away the sting of the charges made against her as being in the hands of the liquor industry. Breaking with Aunt Susan had been painful. She hated being misunderstood. Here, she could be heard again, write with more clarity. She had written a letter to Shirley about the planned move but also pouring out the anguish of Clara’s loss and her trouble with National. “I will die as I have lived, misunderstood by those I love best and serve most.”

  She sat on the porch steps while Ben smoked his pipe from a rocking chair downwind of her. Can I really give it all up to come here? Her stomach tightened at the uncertainty that clutched at her. She felt most in control when she drew her own map, and this move had only vapors of that. She remembered asking her students once to define powerful, giving her definition first. “I think it’s a word that means one can set a goal and then figure out how to make it happen.” That was being powerful.

  But her students had told her no, it was wealth. Another boy said, “No, when you’re big and strong like Mr. Duniway, that’s powerful.” But it had been the smallest child, the quiet one, who had taken her breath away.

  “I think powerful is when you want to quit but you keep going.”

  Maybe there’d be enough with the sale to pay for the ranch and still have a small house in Portland, permit her to “keep going.” The winters might be brutal in this valley, and having a refuge among the association women of Portland could be her escape—if she found she needed it. A meadowlark flitted from a shrub. She’d have to learn the name of the plants and trees, and she’d become familiar with the sound of their dry leaves crinkling in the fall and discover how the Pashimeroi Valley got its name and what were the weather and the ways of this place. A neighboring rancher stopped by to explain a sound that was like horses crossing a creek. “Salmon spawning,” he’d told her. “Slapping the water as they splash over each other.”

  “Imagine,” Abigail had said.

  She rose and found her foolscap paper. They’d brought personal things with them on this trip. The “lodge in the wilderness,” as she began to call it, had come furnished with beds and linens and dishes and even a dog. They’d have to hire a cook and a housekeeper. She’d want time to write.

  September 2, 1886. Blanche Le Clerq, a Tale of the Mountain Mines. It would be a novel about a wealthy mineowner who falls in love with Blanche, who refuses to marry him unless he accepts her passion for the stage and realizes that women can be public and wise and chaste and willing to rule with him and not over him.

  “I’ve started another novel, Ben,” she called out to him after a time.

  “I thought you owned a newspaper.”

  “We did.” How many things will I need to repeat? “And I have another story to serialize for it. I’ll mail it from Ellis, Idaho, so Willis can get the first chapter into the next edition. He’s staying to help the new owner.”

  Ben nodded and smiled at her. “This is good, Jenny. We’ll get horses once we move. We can do that, can’t we?”

  We are moved. “Of course.”

  He sighed. “I’ll have my two loves back again: you and my pintos.”

  At least he put me first in the lineup of his loves. That was what she needed to do for him now too. Put him first. The vote for women would follow, surely, as inevitably as the mountains that rose before them. She’d spent her life doing something worth doing. She’d continue but in a new way from a new place. It was how the world moved and women with it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  No Worry in the World

  1893–96

  _______

  Abigail adjusted her hat. At least the fashion now allowed for the brim to be flattened at the back so a woman could lean against the stagecoach leather without worrying about smashing the brim or removing her hat to hold in her lap—if alone in the carriage. Dusty as it was, the trip was the balm she needed. She’d been spending summers at the lodge, looking after Ben. At least helping the boys look after him. Clyde was home from Cornell for the summer, and Ralph helped as well, so she was free to take the call. She lowered the canvas window to prevent the dust from rolling in. She’d be in Boise by evening, geared up, as they said about harnessed horses, to work.

  Come at once. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is spoiling everything. They’ve arranged for a hearing before the convention, in advance of ours, asking for a clause in the new Constitution to prohibit liquor traffic. They won’t get it, of course, but they will prohibit us from getting a Woman’s Suffrage plank, if you don’t come.

  Eighty miles she’d traveled by train after nearly two hundred miles by stage. She’d been in remote Blackfoot when the letter reached her. Still, she’d arrived on time.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re here.” The head of the local suffrage association met her. They hoped they could insert women’s right to vote into the proposed statehood constitution.

  “It’s the prohibitionists that’ll kill us,” Abigail said. She felt a kinship with those women fighting the opposition to suffrage, making the cause her own no matter what state or territory she might be in. “And the women who support temperance, they’ll be our death too if we let them.”

  Abigail brushed dust from her skirt, grateful once again that hoops had gone out of style. Her added weight wasn’t complemented by the new hourglass jackets over skirts, but seeing her reflection in the full-length mirror as she entered the hotel made her decide she looked “formidable.” Just what a woman needed these days to take on the politicians. “I’m beginning to think that the hops growers are the ones promoting temperance and prohibition, in the background of course. They know the very idea that women will vote to take away the average man’s access to liquor will keep them from voting yes with their pens.”

  “You never tire,” her colleague said. She set Abigail’s dusty carpetbag on the floor in front of the desk at the Boise hotel. “I thought you might like the quiet time in your room before tomorrow’s speech at the legislature. Otherwise I’d be so pleased to have you stay at my home.”

  “Very thoughtful,” Abigail told the younger woman, though she wondered if her reputation for late-night talks of a woman’s plight—and sometimes a bit too much of her own—might have influenced where she stayed. She actually would have liked the give-and-take of civic conversation. It fed her, got her dander up so she was fiery in her presentations. Her sons tired of her constant talk of suffrage, and Ben . . . well, Ben didn’t talk much at all anymore, occasionally of simple things: how the dog loved to jump into the stock tank on hot days, or the smell of sagebrush wafted by a gentle breeze. He was aware of what was right in front of him, the present moment, but carried little interest in politics or even how well the boys were doing or how well Earl, Clara Belle’s son and their only grandson, had taken to ranching.

  At least that was one good thing that had happened from their land purchase—Earl had found an interest. The boy was also the one to write long letters to her when she was in Portland and had become a stable caretaker to Ben. She found him to be a better letter-writer than talker when she was with him, though.

  The invitation came on behalf of women getting the vote. She could promote her cause and add a side dish of comradery she now missed inside her own home.

  “I’ll see you in the morning. Thank you for welcoming me.”

  “This is the great Abigail Scott Duniway,” the woman told the hotel agent. “We’ve reserved the best room for her.”

  Outwardly, Abigail brushed away the compliment, but she took it inside, let it fill her up.

  The presentation went so well that Abigail found herself beaming as she boarded the stage to return home, savoring her own words. The July heat brought out her fan, and she wasn’t
looking forward to the journey, but she could bask in the accolades of how creatively she’d organized her presentation. She had pointed out—the legislators having just heard from a temperance promoter—that they were witness to how women were able to hold different views and weren’t all of one mix. The observation served her argument that this was what the framers wanted when they created this American idea, that moving toward freedom and the vote for all would simply bring out stronger discourse, more rational ideas for discussion from all citizens.

  They’d applauded politely as they had for the temperance folk. But she’d felt hopeful that they’d include a separate plank in their state constitution. She’d travel back to support it if needed. It was what she did.

  “I have become a magnet for opposition, it seems,” she told Ben. They rode side by side on the path that followed the stream running through their Lost River property. Ben’s mind was clearer after their rides, she’d noticed, though she didn’t know why. She could hear the stream. Water, too, had become a point of contention, with their neighbors disagreeing about a diversion dam they’d placed to irrigate their fields being seen as interrupting the water needs of downstream neighbors. Is there nothing in my life that doesn’t carry controversy?

  The dog they’d inherited, Champ was his name, followed along behind. No one had any idea how old the mutt was, but she guessed he was ten or more. He didn’t bound about like a puppy. His long hair easily matted if she or Ben or Earl forgot to brush him. As with her, middle age had set in to Champ.

  “The magnet is in the barn,” Ben said. “What did you need it for?”

  “Nothing. Sorry I mentioned it.” She wished she had someone to talk over her frustrations with, someone to bounce her ideas off. Earl chattered of cattle raising. She wrote to Clyde, who responded, but he was busy at class—he had transferred to Harvard. It would be as good as or better than Harvey’s legal degree. The other boys, minus Hubert, lived at the Clay house in Portland and did not write often. Ralph was a full-fledged lawyer now, and Wilkie worked as a proofreader for the Evening Telegram. Willis stayed in the printing business too as a proofreader for Harvey’s dreaded Oregonian. Hubert and Cora had gone to New York to make their mark brokering lumber from the West. Children, scattered to the winds like maple leaves. Their lodge-in-the-wilderness ranch had simply not been enough to support them all, with wheat and cattle prices plummeting. Abigail would rather be in Portland herself, but Ben did so much better here, especially in the summer months. And right now, suffrage action was in Idaho. She hoped she’d be invited to give a rousing speech and find someone to talk politics with afterward.