Something Worth Doing Page 7

  “Give yourself time before you start your family,” Fanny advised her. “It’ll be easier on you, believe me.”

  “Believe her,” Jenny added. “Any news, Harriet?”

  “We want to wait.” Harriet had married her own sweetheart.

  “It’s good you and William are of one accord with that,” Kate said. “John and I have discussed it.” She blushed. “And he doesn’t want to interfere with nature.”

  “That’s my Ben too,” Jenny said. “What they don’t realize is how repeated pregnancies deplete a woman’s body and interfere with nature too. Look at Momma.”

  “Twelve of us. And there’d have been more if she had lived,” Fanny said. “Father being who he is.” She wiped Eda’s face. The child always had a runny nose and a frequent cough, especially in the spring. Fanny inhaled. “How does a mother survive the death of a child? At least she didn’t live to witness William’s lonely grave on the trail.”

  “Birth and death. It’s a woman’s lot to mark her world by those bookends.” Jenny sighed. “But,” she perked up. “I think we’ve done all the damage we can do to what’s left here. The wagon’s ready as soon as Ben and the men return with the teams. Let’s have a cup of tea.”

  Harriet found the tea tin and lifted the pot from the iron over the outdoor fire they’d built. “I’m glad you found Clara’s silver spoon though. Momma snuck that along.”

  “I could write a poem about all the things we brought that Papa never knew about.” Jenny laughed.

  “Do that,” Fanny said. “I managed to bring needles, right out in the open. Father never said a word.”

  “He knew you’d need them to patch his pants,” Kate said.

  Copies of the Argus Jenny had stacked and tied were ready to be put into the wagon.

  “Are you saving all those issues?” Sarah Maria, the youngest sister, asked.

  “They can be cut up for dress patterns. And they’ll be useful if I ever teach again,” Jenny said. “The Argus deals with hide prices and women’s recipes, so the men think we can’t get into too much trouble reading it. But the articles that stimulate the mind is what people need, even farm wives. At least I do. So I read News of the World and the Spectator too. I just don’t accept everything as gospel.” She lifted her eyes in time to watch a breeze flutter across the field, brushing bachelor buttons, grasses, the movement easing toward them like an invisible wave until it reached the girls and cooled Jenny’s face. She looked up at the sky. No sign of a storm. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” Sarah Maria asked.

  “The way you can watch weather change. All was quiet, and then with barely a flutter, the entire field began to wave and carried the breeze right here.”

  Kate—the beautiful sister, as Jenny thought of her—stared at the timbers.

  “Never mind,” Jenny said. “I suppose I’m twisted as an old oak, finding metaphors where no one else does. It’s that change happens so invisibly at times, one hardly notices. Like Clara Belle. One day she was babbling as though she carried on a conversation with inflections and bursts of sounds that made no sense, and then within a day, voilà! She said, ‘Where’s Pa?’”

  “Your teaching gifts are showing then,” Kate said.

  “Maybe. Time is moving. The world is moving.”

  Jenny kept her gaze at the field where all the foliage whispered and aspen leaves fluttered. She decided then to write something down about what she’d seen, how change crept up on people when not expected, how the language of the landscape spoke as loudly as words sometimes.

  Jenny shook ash from the straw broom. She’d swept through this mess soon after the fire, and they hoped the spring rains might have washed up other treasures. But she thought they had taken all they could from this hardscrabble place.

  “Do you want to keep that?” Sarah Maria reached for the broom. She had celebrated her tenth birthday and looked up to her older sisters, whom she didn’t get to see much as she lived with Fanny and Amos. She appeared to relish being brought this time to help out. Jenny watched her grasp that broom, a woman’s tool, and stand the way men held rifles in studio photographs as though they were a defense as well as a stabilizer.

  “An ode to the broom,” Jenny said, using her teacher’s voice. “It sweeps up dirt, then gets put back into the closet until the next mess. Not unlike a woman. Brooms of the world we are.”

  “We all have something of Momma’s, I think,” Fanny said. She shifted baby Eda to her other hip. Eda had her mother’s deep-set eyes and looked sober and wise beyond her almost three years. And she had full, arched eyebrows like Sarah’s. She looked pale, Jenny thought.

  “I’ve got Momma’s thimble,” Kate said. “And you’ve got the spoon and her stories.”

  “Being sickly kept me inside a lot, so she talked to me. But I also saw how hard she worked, how tired she was, all the time.” Jenny saved the tea leaves in a small linen bag. She stuck it in her apron pocket. There might be another cup inside it.

  “Having children every other year didn’t help.”

  “Let that be a lesson to us all.” Harriet said. “I have a twist of her hair I wove into my bridal veil.”

  “I remember that. It was lovely,” Kate said.

  “If you want to wear it, you can. It can be your something borrowed.”

  “Or something old,” Fanny added.

  “It’s nice you’ve had time to plan for your wedding, Kate.” Jenny sounded wistful and she knew she shouldn’t. She’d made the choice to marry Ben as soon as she had. It wasn’t like there was a mass of suitors. Well, that one—Bunter—who had written her a letter and acted like he was doing her a favor in proposing. He’d since written letters to the Argus editor about strident women and how he was as eligible a bachelor as any and the government made it hard on him to compete with other landed gents who could snatch up an Oregon woman who brought land with her. Land was all that man had wanted. Ben had wanted something more, and she was grateful for that. If she hadn’t loved him to begin with, how would she have endured these past years as they struggled together?

  “It has been fun to be courted by a captain over time. But he’s quite certain of his preferences,” Kate said. “He picked out our house with little say from me. Not like your Sunny Hillside Farm you and Ben chose together. I like the name you gave it. It has a happy tone to it.”

  “Near beautiful Lafayette. The French would be so pleased,” Jenny said. “It is a good part of the valley. Orchards abound.” Lafayette was the county seat, so stores were but a few miles from the farm. “Maybe it won’t be so lonely during the rainy season. We women can get together now and then, even in the rain.”

  Ben and her brother Harvey and others brought the teams and empty wagons back and chatted to her sisters while Ben harnessed the horses to the wagon the women had loaded.

  “It’s a good place, Jenny,” Harvey said. “You’ll thrive there.”

  “Women thrive wherever we’re planted,” Jenny said. But she knew the soil, the tending, and the exposure to the sun made all the difference in how well one flourished.

  She turned back one last time to look at the burned-out carcass, witness the rebuilt barn and fences after the tornado and all that had happened at this hardscrabble place. She wished the new owners good fortune. They had a nice barn and fresh-peeled logs for their cabin to begin with anyway. She hoped for better things at Sunny Hillside Farm. Give the neighbors something good to gossip about the Duniways now, instead of clucking their pitying tongues at their tragedies.

  She faced forward on the seat and watched the wagons ahead, carrying harnesses, shovels, forks. “Wait! Let’s take the broom.”

  “I’ll get you a new one,” Ben said.

  “No. That one is my symbol of endurance.”

  Ben pulled up the team. “Little Toot, ride back and get your sister’s old broom. Where’d you leave it?”

  “Leaned it up against the hearthstones.” Jenny pointed.

  “I’ll have
it for you in a minute, Sister.”

  Little Toot kneed his mount and rode back to bring her symbol of a woman’s work—and maybe of her life. Old brooms swept away dust and disappointment, but both came back.

  NINE

  Ora et Labora

  NOVEMBER 1857

  _______

  “They published it. The Burning Forest Tree by Jenny Glen.” Jenny put the newspaper on the table while Ben drank his morning coffee. “What do you think?”

  The sun had peeked its nose above the horizon, casting long shadows over the green. It promised to be a pretty day, fluffy clouds pushing November gray away. The babies slept, a moment of reprieve. Little Toot had grown into “Jerry.” After Harvey returned from the war, Jerry, now a wisp-of-whiskers teen starting to shave, had gone off to live with their father and stepmother, helping his father farm and work at the sawmill near Forest Grove. Jenny had resisted Jerry’s leaving, but the appeal of his being able to go to school in Tualatin Academy won her over. Education was critical for all people. Harvey was right about that but wrong that he thought it less critical for girls, and that if someone wanted schooling for their children past the eighth grade, they should pay for it and not expect the government to do it. Her argument—exchanged over the meal the evening of Harvey’s celebratory return—was that it was in the country’s best interest to have educated, critical thinkers, and providing for it for free with all citizens helping to pay for it, for as long as someone gained from it, made sense to her. Their siblings present had groaned at the rising level of voices, and it was Jerry who had eased the temperature down and said, “Let’s just eat.”

  Harvey worked now too for their father in the sawmill and took college preparatory classes—that he paid for himself, he reminded them all. He’d been hardened by the war, living in harsh conditions, and didn’t have much room for looking after those Jenny saw as less fortunate through no fault of their own. She knew firsthand how a storm or a fire could set a family back. Jenny watched her youngest brother eat. Thin as a bird he was. He’d lost weight since leaving Sunny Hillside. Like her, he tended to frailness, and like her, he would push himself to exhaustion to prove he could. She knew he dreamed of becoming a lawyer, taking on cases to help others. She’d do everything she could to help make that happen. She knew about dreams.

  She’d burned the midnight oil to write that poem and had overcome her fears by taking it to the Argus editor. He’d accepted it.

  “Abigail Duniway. That’s how it’ll be attributed,” the editor said.

  “Oh. No.” What will people think? If they don’t like it, it’ll bring ill repute onto Ben. She should have thought of that before. “No. Ah, let’s say Jenny Glen wrote it.” Her pen name. The editor had shrugged and wrote it on the copy she’d presented.

  “You’re Jenny Glen?” Ben’s blue eyes gazed up at her, held surprise. He read the poem again. “I like the part where you talk about the air being like no other. And ‘I feel no loneliness.’ I like that best.” He handed the Argus back to her. “I don’t want you to be lonely. That’s why I invite friends over. But why didn’t you use Jenny Duniway. Or Abigail Duniway? Are you—”

  “No, no. I thought it might bring negative attention to you if people don’t like it. To us.”

  “Naw. It’s a little poem. The womenfolk will like it. Well done, Wife.” He changed the subject. “We finished planting those five acres. Apples soon. This land is perfect for it.” He stood, tipping back the chair as he lifted his leg up and over on his way to grab his hat, kiss Jenny, then head out the door.

  “My moment of glory,” she said as she lifted Ben’s chair back up and pushed it under the table. “Your father did like it though,” she told Clara Belle. “Now we’ll see if anyone else does.” Willis woke and she soon lost thoughts of poetry as she washed his face of mush and took him from the high chair. Clara made her way out the door to wave at her father in the fields and sing a little song to him. “Later I might show your father my column they call ‘The Farmer’s Wife.’ They published it anonymously.” Willis looked back at her with inquisitive brown eyes. “Pretty soon people will be talking about that, if not my poem.”

  She had begun with the anonymous letters to the editor and did a little jig around the wooden floors when she saw the first one in print. She’d signed it The Farmer’s Wife. It recounted an episode when Ben had offered to help her with the laundry that turned into a tale of stumble and trouble, resulting in more work than either of them planned. She made light of Ben’s awkwardness—she referred to him as “the Farmer”—and yes, he was the misery of the episode, but she had wanted to show that a woman’s work took coordination and effort and could be as complicated as that of planting a field of straight rows or operating a sawmill safely.

  After supper, Ben picked up the paper. “Did you read this, Jenny? The Farmer’s Wife is quite a cutup. Looks like we weren’t the only ones who had a bad washday, though she makes it funnier than ours was.”

  Jenny remained silent, her heart pounding.

  “Say.” He looked up at her. “Did you write this?”

  “I did. Are you upset?”

  “Me? No. It makes hay out of straw.” He laughed, tapped his finger on the page. “I bet you get some letters though.”

  And she did. People said they liked the Farmer’s Wife and hoped she’d continue her stories. During the long rainy months, she’d written of isolation and how their being closer to a town had made the showery days less dreary, knowing once a week they could traverse the muddy roads to go to church, if not to market. She planned to slip in a few words about the value of women’s work and such—if the editor allowed it. The copyeditor started putting a block around Jenny’s letters, to make them stand out, as though they were a column.

  She speaks my heart, a reader wrote. It was then Jenny knew that words had power. Her words, at least, got others to respond. Wasn’t that the purpose of words—to get movement, to share the burdens and even joys?

  She got braver. She wrote not about who visited whom or of church events. She left those topics to others. Jenny’s subjects pushed toward the fate of women, how hard they worked, how some men took better care of their horses than of their wives and daughters. She charged that once men gained wealth to hire workers, they never thought to bring such hired help to their mates (Kate’s husband John’s hiring help excluded) and how they acted like they didn’t want to tax a woman’s constitution by allowing her to attend public events with men. And certainly many men did not want women to vote—heaven forbid, and a few men thought heaven did actually forbid a woman’s vote—but it was fine to treat a woman like a beast of burden.

  “The Farmer’s Wife is a peevish, ill-natured, irritable, fault-finding common scold.” The letter wasn’t signed. She wasn’t surprised. She didn’t mind being called a scold, but a common one? She was better than that, and she wrote as much in her follow-up letter to “anonymous upset reader.”

  Who is the Farmer’s Wife, advising men how to treat their families? She should stop her malicious babbling at once.

  Her husband needs to set her down and teach her a thing or two.

  Most responses were anonymous, but Mr. Bunter had written that such a witchery point of view had no place in a family press and he was canceling his subscription.

  She’d purposely not shown Ben those letters nor the responses the newspaper had printed either. Ben didn’t read all that much, and some comments made her cheeks burn when she saw them referring to her as that “common scold” and even a “hag.”

  Those words stung, but they also fueled. How could simply pointing out the importance of treating women like people and not beasts of burden create such an uproar? She wasn’t sure what they’d say once she got her novel published, and she would. But whether she’d use her own name or not, she wasn’t sure. How far could she go using words as brooms to sweep up trouble and even stir up more trouble that needed stirring up? She’d taken a risk and now would have to face the consequen
ces.

  When Jenny wasn’t finding respite in writing, she worked and often mused of what other women did to overcome the drudgery of their days. How did they build their spirits up? She’d think of loftier things, but then the daily regimen would take over.

  It being Monday, that included laundry. “Why Monday?” she told Clara, who chased Willis around the table as the toddler squealed in delight. “Why not do laundry on Saturday when clean clothes can be worn on Sunday, the very next day,” she told her children. And when the following day a woman could have respite in the pews, laundry being the hardest of labors. Ora et labora. Prayer and work. Harvey had given her that Latin phrase. He was teaching himself Latin and Greek. How fortunate for him he has the nights to study.

  At least today it wasn’t raining, so as she moved between their frame house and the laundry cottage at the farm, she wouldn’t get doused and the clothes would dry faster.

  She heated the water on the cookstove, lamenting that she didn’t have the strength to lift the heavier cast-iron pots and instead had to dip pitchers into the scalding water, then carry them to the big wooden tubs where she’d add the lye soap and stir the sheets and mud-stained jeans with a stick as wide as an oar. Then into a second tub of rinse water before hanging them with split pegs on the line. Before the children were born, Ben built fires beneath the cauldrons so she didn’t have to carry the water, but she’d heard tales of children falling into the tubs or tripping into the fire. Twice in her own childhood she’d rescued both Kate and Harvey from laundry fires. I must remind Harvey that I once saved his life.

  At least here she stoked the cookstove, feeding it kindling, and it took the chill off the laundry cottage in the fall and winter; heated it to a misery in the summers. Despite the work it took—and how Monday always ended with her joints aching worse than any other day—she preferred this safer method. In the distance, she could see Ben and his workers planting apple trees and wished she had help as she pegged the sheets.