NINE
Ora et Labora

NOVEMBER 1857

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“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 consequences.

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.

The truth, she told herself, was that she’d rather be teaching or writing, almost anything except laundry or other “domestic arts.” Her sisters were so much better at them than she was. Fanny could whip up a meal for a dozen with hardly a second thought, even with her Eda’s runny nose and Lillian’s weepy eyes. “Something in the air bothers them,” Fanny had written in her latest letter. Maggie had two children as well, but her boat-house-store dodging in and out of ports on the coast was still as tidy as her quilt stitches. “Clean house, clean heart,” she said. “You only need what’s functional.”

“I’ll decide later about the clutter,” Jenny had told Maggie. “The children don’t mind and the floors are clean. Cobwebs grow overnight. Can’t be helped. Spiders get free rides inside on the logs.”

She supposed it was some small comfort knowing that all of her sisters—and women everywhere—were washing clothes on this day of the week as she was. Kate would be doing laundry too, but John had hired help for her, and it was only the two of them! Such a small basket of dirty clothes. Envy stuck out its tongue.

Laundry was such a thankless task having to be done over and over. She’d told Harriet’s inventive husband that he ought to come up with some way to make laundry easier and not just spend his inventive mind on doodads like punched patterns in tin lanterns. She’d told Ben that too, and he’d said, as he often did to her suggestions, “I’ll think over it.”

When she wasn’t composing poems or articles while she spun wool or churned cream, she worried over money. Teaching had once given her currency to call her own. Ben listened to Jenny at least. He still thought though that men were entitled to hunt and fish and “jaw” and visit and offer undiminished hospitality as respite from their labor no matter the season nor their income. Women had no such hope to interrupt their daily demands. He didn’t always know how inventive she had to get to spread their cash or trade in ways that kept the family—and the many friends Ben brought around—fed.

He let her save a little of her egg-and-butter money for her books, papers, and lead, and she had proposed they buy a small house in town where they might spend winter months so the children could attend school. “A man should be responsible for financial matters,” he’d said, but he went along with the Lafayette house purchase. “It’s how we look after our women, protect you.” But what of those men as she imagined Mr. Bunter was? Who protects those wives? And widows? A woman needed control over her income, but laws would have to be remade to make that so. And men made all the laws. How would that ever change?

Her hands were chapped by the harsh lye soap she used to launder clothes. Jenny prayed while she folded the “underlings,” as her mother had called the unmentionables. She wished she could find peace in the everyday work instead of resentment of its daily-ness, its weekly-ness, its constant-ness. The domestic arts did not make her thrive. Instead, they were bars on a window women had to look through to accomplish anything. She stood and pressed both hands on her lower back. She’d need to stop and prepare a noon meal for Ben and his helpers. She walked toward the house, checking the line to see if those clothes were dry enough to remove and she could prepare to hang up others after the cleanup from the noon break. She felt a trickle between her legs. She still bled, especially on Mondays.

Jenny finished the laundry as the day waned, bringing evening cooling. She rested her body on a bench Ben had built outside the laundry cottage. Clara’s clear voice belted out the alphabet song to Willis, who tried the same but babbled an up-and-down rhythm instead. “Clara, you have your daddy’s voice, and poor Willis, you got mine.”

Why she pondered women’s labor so much, she wasn’t certain, but women spent so much time in work, praying for ease. Except for childbirth, she’d had no time to lie and rest. There was always something more to do. She had written that ode to the broom, singing its praises as a sign of what women were—laborers in the never-ending fields.

“A woman should get paid for her housework.” She said it out loud to Ben.

“How would that work?” Ben asked. He settled on the bench beside her.

“If her husband paid her, she could hire others who liked to sweep and clean and tend, women who did that well. And she could do what she was called to. That would allow a woman to take on work more meaningful to her, like asking questions. Why couldn’t a woman make her way doing what she liked to do as much as a man? Why shouldn’t she get land in her own name even without a husband? The Farmer’s Wife might need to take on that subject.”

“I hope it doesn’t become too obvious who the Farmer’s Wife is, Jenny.”

She turned to him. “Does that worry you?” She didn’t want to make his life complicated nor somehow tarnish the Duniway name.

He was thoughtful. “I suppose not. Must be a sign of a wise farmer if he can allow his wife to speak her mind. At least you’re not up on some stage like I hear those Eastern women sometimes do.”

“Yes, public speaking is the realm of men. My father always says that.” She watched the sunset turn the world a rosy hue. “But something might be so important that it would be worth risking a woman’s reputation to speak her voice in public, as a man can, don’t you think?”

Ben sat silent. “I’ll think over it.”