Lilac year, p.3
Lilac Year, page 3
And she had to. For Joshua.
The ride seemed endless, as infinite as the land that spread from horizon to horizon and the sky that arched overhead. She felt suddenly small and vulnerable, a lonely spot in this great openness. She shivered, glancing around her nervously.
“What are you looking for?” Ben asked.
“Indians.” It wasn’t exactly true, but it was easier than trying to explain the odd sensation that had overtaken her.
He threw back his head and hooted with laughter. Affronted, Mariah straightened up on the buckboard. “What is so amusing? There are Indians here, right?”
Ben nodded. “Of course. But the Lakota are no problem.”
“No problem? But what about the scalping, the massacres, the—”
He held up his hand to stop her. “No scalping, no massacres. The Lakota are good, fine people.” He grew serious and stared ahead thoughtfully. “Though I don’t see why they haven’t been angrier. I know I’d be if someone took my land.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Mariah objected. “And they should be grateful, not upset. After all, we’re bringing them civilization.”
Ben brought the wagon to a halt. “There’s civilization, and then there’s civilization, Mariah. And from what I know of the Lakota, I sometimes think they know more about the meaning of the word than we do.”
“But they’re savages!”
“Absolutely not. Savage can be the way one acts or thinks. But to say the Lakota are savage because they look different or have different ways is totally wrong.” He picked up the reins and urged the horses on again. “Not that it’ll matter in a practical sense anyway. The chances you’ll run into a Lakota on the farm are slim. But I would recommend you rethink your feelings.”
Mariah thought about what he had said as they rode quietly on. There was a ring of truth to it. She didn’t know anything about the native people who lived here. All she’d heard was rumor.
Nevertheless, she’d take comfort in his prediction that she wouldn’t encounter any of the people he called the Lakota. Besides, there were undoubtedly more menaces on this flat new land, some not as obvious as the others. Menaces she had to rescue Joshua from.
The prairie darkened momentarily, and Mariah looked up. The cloud that had been a faint thread across the sky only moments earlier had drifted across the sun.
Mariah shuddered involuntarily at the omen, but almost immediately the sun shot through the cloud and washed the prairie with early summer sunshine.
She was in Dakota.
two
Ben and Mariah rode by a few small towns on their way to Prospect—at least Mariah assumed they were what passed as small towns out here. They were little more than groups of raw new buildings huddled together as if seeking protection from the perils of the wild prairie.
All around them the wind blew. Nothing stopped its path, and it never let up. She wrapped her scarf tighter and pulled it forward to shield her eyes from its onslaught.
As they jounced along on the wagon, the regularity of the horses’ hoofbeats on the dirt road lulled her mind, and her thoughts returned to Joshua.
Somewhere out here was her nephew.
When she had last seen him, he had just memorized his alphabet. Would his new family know how much he loved to learn? Would they recognize that he had the potential to become a doctor or a lawyer?
She surveyed the open land in scorn. How could people in this wasteland stress education when all their efforts had to be channeled into scraping a living off the soil? There weren’t even any trees out here, except for a few scraggly cottonwoods that dotted the landscape here and there.
“Prospect’s right ahead,” Ben said, interrupting her reverie.
Mariah sat forward on the hard wooden seat and strained her eyes to see what he was pointing at. She could barely make out a bump on the horizon.
“That’s Prospect?” she asked, frowning.
Ben nodded proudly. “Best little town in the Dakota Territory.”
“How ‘little’ is it?” Trepidation filled her voice.
“Oh, maybe one hundred and fifty, if you count the households from the surrounding area that use Prospect.”
“How do they use Prospect? Does it have a school?”
He looked at her curiously. “Are you a teacher?”
She shook her head. “Seamstress.”
“The school used to meet at the church, but Lainie, the woman who lived in the house where you’re staying, was the teacher. Since she left, the young ones have been going to Mackenzie Township, which is quite a distance from here. I told Olea she should do it,” he informed her with a sly grin. “She knows everything, or thinks she does. You know how big sisters are.”
She did, and the memory of Lorna guiding her through life struck her heart like a knife.
She turned the conversation back to him. “Olea’s your sister?”
“Yup. She’s older than me, which means that in her eyes I’m still a stripling barely out of short pants. You have any sisters or brothers?”
Mariah thought about Lorna, and about her mission here in the territory. “I had an older sister,” she said faintly, trying to block the memory of Lorna’s gentle smile and her warm, laughing eyes.
He glanced at her, an unspoken question in his eyes, but she dropped her gaze, pretending to settle her skirt over her knees.
He looked back toward the horses and urged them onward.
Soon he turned the wagon down a side road. “We’ll stop at my house first, if you don’t mind. I don’t know about you, but I could use a cool drink.”
Mariah nodded. The water they’d shared from the glass jar balanced between them had gone brackish with the day’s heat, and she drank it only out of necessity.
He pulled up in front of a large house that gleamed white in the afternoon sun. It looked recently painted, and Mariah realized that the entire house was new. It was actually quite grand, even by East Coast standards.
On the large porch that surrounded the first floor, several chairs were placed. The windows were open, and red-and-white-checked curtains caught the slight breeze that drifted across the yard.
He helped her down from the wagon and led her to the front door.
It opened into the parlor. It was a typical man’s room, with brightly colored throws covering sturdy heavy pine furniture. The only things she hadn’t expected were the shelves of books that lined two walls.
Ben excused himself to get them some tea, and in his absence, Mariah examined the titles on the volumes. They surprised her: plays by Shakespeare, philosophical works by Plato and Aristotle, a Bible, and a thick volume of English poetry. She hadn’t figured Ben to be the literary type.
Ben returned with two glasses of tea.
“Ice!” Mariah exclaimed.
“I have an ice house. I cut ice in the winter, and it usually lasts all summer long.”
Mariah drank deeply. It seemed as if all the road dust had gone into her throat, and the iced tea certainly helped wash it away.
He glanced at the clock that ticked loudly on the mantel. “We should probably go to the other house,” he said.
Out on the porch, he motioned across the field. “There’s the farmstead there,” he told her. “Finish your tea, and we’ll go over there. The horses should be somewhat rested by now.”
“Why take the horses?” she asked. “Let’s walk. It can’t be that far.” Her back ached from the long wagon ride, and she longed to stretch out by walking.
“Out here, distances can be deceiving. It’s at least a mile away, more probably two.”
Mariah squinted against the sun. “It doesn’t look that far.”
He laughed. “Trust me. I’ve trekked back and forth between these two houses every day for the last three months. It’s a long way away.”
This was just another strange thing about the Dakota Territory, Mariah thought as they rode to what might become her new home. Nothing was ever quite what she expected.
And she certainly never expected to see what met her eyes when Ben pulled into the yard.
Weather-beaten boards made up the exterior of the small house, and the ground was splotchy with grass and dirt. Everywhere she looked, she saw neglect and defeat.
She climbed down from the wagon and wandered around the bare front yard.
“Karl had to let some things slide when his wife got sick,” Ben said, noting her dismay.
“She was sick?” Mariah asked, idly fingering the limp leaf of a nearly dead apple tree seedling.
“In the family way,” he answered briefly. “That’s why they went to Wisconsin.”
Mariah’s eyes shot to his. “She had to go Wisconsin to have a baby? Aren’t there any doctors here?” This was something else to blacken Dakota’s image in her mind.
Ben looked uneasy. “Well, sure we have doctors. Lainie just wanted to be with her kinfolk when her time came.”
Mariah understood the woman’s reasoning. The same thought had driven her out here to find Joshua and bring him safely back home.
Ben opened the door. “Why don’t you look around inside while I see to the livestock?”
The small house was actually one large room, divided by a single blanket strung across ropes. She explored curiously.
The room in its entirety was no more than twelve feet square. The walls were made of planed pine. Someone had tried to whitewash the boards, and the untreated plank had absorbed the paint unevenly, leaving the walls stippled white and brown.
She ran her fingers across the furred surface of the boards. The grooves left by the planing blades were faint—a sign of good millwork.
She turned her attention to the rest of the room. A black cast-iron stove hunkered in one corner, and beside it shelves were filled with clear bottles of preserved vegetables and berries. Their cheerful ruby, topaz, and emerald colors provided the only spots of brightness in that part of the room.
Under the shelves a little table was pushed against the wall, with two straight-back chairs neatly centered on each end. Blue and white dishes were stacked in a precise pile in the middle of the table.
She put her hand on the table, and when she lifted it, the imprint remained. A fine layer of dust covered everything, a result of the wind that had been blowing relentlessly all day and had only now quieted to a gentle breeze.
She was pleased to notice that the windows were glass, not the waxy paper she had heard was being used instead of the expensive panes that had to be imported by train or wagon from the East.
The only other concession to the amenities she had known back East was the bed. Despite the dust, the brass headboard shone, and the wedding-ring quilt that graced the top of it combined muted pastels into a harmonious palette. The seamstress in her came out, and she examined the quilt closely. Each tiny stitch was even and strong, and when she turned it over, the pattern emerged through the stitchery. This, she knew, was the mark of a good seamstress.
A blanket was strung across one corner of the room. She lifted the flap curiously and discovered a large washtub and a discreet bowl and pitcher. She’d seen an outhouse when they drove up, so the chinaware must be for those times when going outside was impossible. Involuntarily she shuddered at what those times would have been. The Dakota Territory’s winters were notorious on the East Coast. According to her landlady in Lowell, the cold was so severe that thermometers would burst. She’d have to ask Ben about that. Not that it would matter, of course; she wouldn’t be here long enough to see a change of seasons.
Her eyes were drawn to the opposite corner. There, tucked into the junction of two walls, was a bracketed shelf. The board had been cut into a triangle so the shelf nestled securely without either end extending into the room. It was an incredibly economical use of the limited space the house offered.
The shelf displayed a small ceramic cube. The top was hinged, and inside were the workings of a music box. She wound it, and the strains of Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” filled the room.
Mariah felt a kinship with the woman who had lived there, “Lainie” Ben had called her. She, too, must have been drawn away from the civilized surroundings of the East Coast, perhaps New York or Boston. Was this her memento, the only thing she could bring with her as a reminder of her old life?
No wonder it occupied such a spot of honor.
But why had she left it? Had she been in such a hurry to leave that she had forgotten it? Or had it lost its meaning?
Mariah sank onto the bed, still holding the music box. Questions tumbled through her head like tumbleweeds caught in the wild Dakota wind. Why had the woman left the security of her home to come to such an untamed place? Could it have been out of love for her husband? Mariah could not imagine such a thing. No love could conquer this wilderness.
When Ben walked into the house, Mariah was still sitting on the bed, the music box in her hand.
“Made up your mind yet?” he asked.
She looked around her with a kind of despair. This was not where she wanted to bring Joshua, but at the same time she had to remember that even if she found him, she couldn’t take him back home right away. She didn’t have enough money for train fare for both of them to return to Massachusetts immediately.
“Is there any way I can make some money out here?” she asked bluntly.
“Meggin Sanders was just mentioning the other day that she can’t sew fast enough to keep up with the demand. She runs the store in Prospect. I’d think you could probably do that, if you wanted to.”
Mariah took one more look around. If for no other reason than to honor the woman who had left this, her home, to have a baby, she would stay. She would improve it as best she could, too. This woman named Lainie would return to a house that was put to rights for a woman who was now a mother. It didn’t matter if she was on the prairie or in the midst of the finest hotel in New York City—she deserved more.
She would do it in honor of her sister, who had to have died with fear in her veins about what would become of her beloved son.
“All right,” she said to Ben. “I’ll stay.” Then she faced him. “But I must tell you one thing. I’ve come out here with a purpose, and as soon as I’ve accomplished it, I’ll be leaving.”
An expression that she couldn’t read rushed across his face, there and gone so quickly that she had no idea what it was, no idea what he felt. Time seemed to hold its breath, measured only by the faint sawing of grasshoppers and the trilling of a meadowlark, and she waited for him to fill the void with an explanation.
His eyes, bluer even than the afternoon sky—Scandinavian blue, she thought—were locked onto her own, and she didn’t move, waiting for him to speak.
At last he turned, saying merely, “I’ll unload the wagon.”
She clasped her fingers together tightly around the music box. This was not the answer she’d wanted to hear.
❧
Ben dropped the reins lightly on Old Gray’s back. The horse was so used to the routine that he started right up, headed for the barn he knew as home.
Sunlight washed across Ben’s face, and he lifted his hat and dropped it onto the seat beside him, just to welcome the warmth. Thinking was easier, he thought, when the sun shone square on a fellow’s face.
And he had a lot of thinking to do.
So she had made those elegant clothes she wore, he mused. Then she probably wasn’t rich after all. That was a piece of the puzzle—a small piece. She had worked as a seamstress.
He had wanted to ask her why she’d inquired about a school if she wasn’t a teacher, but he’d held back. Whatever she wanted to tell him, she would, in due time.
Ben noticed the way Mariah’s face had closed when she’d spoken of her sister, but not before he caught a glimpse of raw, still-new grief written in her eyes. A wash of sympathy broke over him just remembering, but he wouldn’t speak of it. He knew she needed her silence yet.
There was something in the defiant way she spoke that brushed Ben’s heart, and for the first time he realized that what she was facing was not easy for her, not easy at all.
What it was, he had no idea. Something had brought her out here, something major enough to convince her to leave her home and come to what she perceived as a wild land ready to pounce on her.
There were three kinds of people, he reckoned, that came to Dakota. Four, if he included himself.
First, there were the adventurers, those called by the lure of the open land. He’d met many a fellow out here who had come west solely for the chance to be his own man on his own property. The chance to carve out a piece of the earth and call it home—it was like a magnet to many folks.
He dismissed this as the reason she’d come out here.
Others came because they were fleeing a criminal past. He had met some of those people, too—men who’d traveled west to escape a sure and certain life behind the bars of a prison. In many cases, they’d left their behavior in the East and started again with new resolve. And, of course, there were those who saw the chance to make some money off the unsuspecting newcomers. Society would always have folks like that, those who thought only of how to bilk others out of their belongings, money, or property.
He figured that wasn’t the reason she’d come out here. He almost laughed at the idea of Mariah as a criminal.
The third group came out of desperation, because they had nothing else to do, no place to go. Poverty had forced them out of the big cities from homes they could no longer afford. Here, maybe, a man had a chance to make a go of it. Maybe he could provide a home for his family; maybe he could throw off the burden of need and hold his head up.
Mariah didn’t look poor, not at all, although she’d intimated that money was a concern.
She was a woman of contradictions, though; he was no judge of women’s wear, but what she wore looked to him to be expensive, with jeweled buttons and ruffles and ribbons and some fancy gold twirly things on the collar that he didn’t know the name of.
