ELEVEN
Surety

JANUARY 1859

_______

Jenny listened. She’d been busy stuffing duck feathers for comforters while frying potatoes for their supper. She was as big as a washtub, carrying this third child, and her belly bumped against the table, so her back hurt as she stretched to fill the comforter. She wasn’t sure how she felt about another child so soon, but Ben wanted a big family. She blew feathers from her nose as she heard Ben say to yet another guest in their living room something about “surety.” Ben is offering to secure something? When she later recalled this day, it would be with the scent of bacon swirling around the house, children chattering, and her hands inside the softness of feathers, while her mind pondered uncertainty.

She didn’t know well the man who’d be staying for supper. He’d stopped by and talked apple markets with Ben previously, as she remembered. Since the time she hadn’t been hospitable to two of Ben’s bachelor friends, she rarely said anything about the surprise meals (as she called them) that she had to serve.

She peered into the room and saw something legal-looking in three folds lying on the slab table in front of them. This is not good. She put the feathers aside, sneezed—as she often did around duck feathers—and moved the frying pan off the burner with a scraping sound, then entered the room where Ben watched the children and “jawed” with Mr. Markham. Yes, that’s his name. Bob Markham.

“What high finance is happening in our living room?” She kept her voice light. “I heard the word ‘surety.’ We can’t afford a cosigned note, Ben.”

“Like good Oregonians, we look after each other,” Ben said. His eyebrow twitched. He’s nervous about my interfering. “We’re helping Bob here make his investment in the field. Don’t you like my pun, Wife?” Ben beamed.

He’s trying to distract. Her heart started pounding a little faster. She reached for Willis and plopped him on her hip. He squirmed. Her belly got in the way, so she let him down.

“And how are we helping Bob, here, become outstanding in his field?” She heard the sarcasm in her voice and saw Ben frown.

“Shouldn’t your little lady be protected from thoughts of business and investments?” Jenny heard the challenge to Ben’s “head of household” status in those words.

“I’m signing a note at two percent per month, Abigail.”

He’s called me Abigail!

“They’ll be compounded semiannually until paid, but Bob can then get his loan. He’s good for it. You’ll manage your money well, won’t you, Bob?”

“No question about it.”

She could feel bile rise beneath the baby she carried. “That’s a hefty interest rate.” She turned to Ben. “If Bob”—she emphasized his name—“fails to pay, we could be ruined meeting that kind of obligation in his stead.”

“Now, Jenny, let’s not air our underlings in public.”

He’s offended that I bring up a concern? She was offended that he hadn’t.

“You’ll always be protected, don’t you worry now. Is supper ready? I think I smell that bacon frying but no rasher of potatoes as yet.” He used his fingers to gesture her back into the kitchen the way she clucked at the chickens. She forced a smile, returned to the kitchen, helping three-year-old Willis onto the bench. “Clara, sit. I’ll serve you now.” She banged the pans on the stove, prepared the children’s plates, fed them, and cleaned their faces, and when the men came in, she served them but chose not to sit with them while they ate, going to her bedroom to write and await Bob’s departure. She was as frightened as when Ben got lost in the fog.

Ben signed three notes for Bob. And they argued, fear fueling her words until Ben yelled, actually shouted at her. “Cease, woman. I can take no more. It’s done.”

Their words led to nothing but them curled with their backs away from each other—after Jenny bathed the children and Ben read to them, followed by Jenny cleaning up the table and the kitchen. What could she do? I’m powerless.

“It’s a lot of money, Ben,” she said in the morning, not wanting to challenge him nor return the argument to its burning state.

“He’s good for it. Don’t you worry. Apple markets are excellent. Wheat is too. Remember that proverb. ‘He who waters will himself be watered.’”

She considered that. “I’m not sure watering our neighbor’s field means we should risk our own supplies though, and just expect God to deliver our water from somewhere else.”

Ben patted her crossed hands as they sat at the table. “You worry over much,” he said. “Haven’t we done well here on Sunny Hillside Farm. And your Lafayette school, in season? Everything is turning out fine.”

“And I’m grateful. But my egg-and-butter money is our only cash until fall. And Californians are planting again, so not buying our wheat. Several of our neighbors have opted out for schooling, lacking the cash for tuition, they say. It’s worrisome. Something is happening all around us. It makes me nervous. I feel . . . vulnerable and—”

“You’re oversensitive. It’ll be better when the baby comes. Work on your story. You always do better when you’ve had a time to write—even those farmer’s letters.”

“I get to blow off steam like our kettle,” she said. “Writing helps turn the heat down. But it doesn’t ease my worries.”

“You’ll always be sheltered,” he assured her. Then added, “First lamb was born last night. We need to start the watch.”

“So much for my writing,” she said, though she’d get a few lines in—memorizing them—while she huddled in the lambing shed awaiting the arrival of lambs whose mothers often needed help. All mothers did. She would trust Ben. What else could she do?

Oregon’s status changed from territory to statehood on Valentine’s Day 1859. In March, Hubert arrived. He was a smaller baby than Willis had been, and though she bled again, the doctor had been there and stitched her up. “Three babies,” she’d cooed to the round face. He was a plump child. “My best delivery yet. Don’t tell the others.” His eyes followed hers.

A month later, Jenny made another delivery—her book. Captain Gray’s Company or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon was published.

“I did it, Ben.” She handed him the book. “Turns out it’s the first published novel in the newest state. Will you read it?”

“I’ll think on it,” he teased, then realized she couldn’t decide if he jested. “Of course I will. I’m married to an author. How about that?” She beamed. “Not right now. But I will read it.”

That night she watched him while he turned the pages, then left him to put the children in their beds. She sang to them one verse, then stopped, saying, “Singing’s not my talent, is it?”

Clara Belle answered with her own sweet notes. “We all have our gifts, Momma. You always say that.”

“Singing is one of yours.”

“And you write, Momma.”

“Yes, I do. I hope your father likes my story.”

“Is Papa in it?” Willis asked.

“Hmm. Maybe a little of him is. As are each of you. It’s hard not to include the ones we love in a story.” She lowered her voice, whispered, “There’s a villain too.”

“What’s that?” Willis tucked the quilt around him so Clara Belle, lying next to him in the featherbed, wouldn’t touch him. “What’s a ‘vill in’?”

“Someone the heroine of the story has to fight against. It wouldn’t be much of a story if she didn’t have someone to fight against to win her cause.”

“So it’s good when Willis and I fight? It makes a better story?”

“Not all tales need arguments.” She kissed their foreheads. “And sisters and brothers should never fight. They should look after each other. Now get some rest.”

Her sisters applauded when she handed a copy to them at a family gathering after church. She hoped to be invited to the Presbyterian academy, though novels weren’t exactly a preference of the literary crowd.

“Congratulations,” Harvey told her. “After I read it, I’ll place a copy in the school library. If it’s suitable.”

“Why, thank you. I think.”

“There are few novels in the collection. They’re somewhat of an anomaly, more of a curiosity than anything learned, of course.”

“Are they checked out?”

“Oh, of course. By students studying fiction as a format. And by what I call simpering women who are somehow engaged by such. They have to make sure it’s suitable for our students.”

“I would expect nothing less. If you reject it, of course, as not good enough, I’ll have to take an ad out in the paper and mention that it’s banned. That’ll make my sales go up.” Might they reject it? Could it be so bad?

He grunted.

Jenny waited for the reviews, but no one wrote a one. Except for her family, it appeared that her book landed like a stone in a pond, making no waves at all.

Her father told her the family back in Illinois would love it, as it was a story of the Scott crossing with the sadness of the widow’s death, “being your mother’s, I assume” and poor “Effie—I guess that’s you? Having to work so hard once they arrive.”

“It’s not me, Papa. It’s a novel.”

Her sisters said little after they’d had time to read it. She’d sent a copy to Shirley Ellis in Sacramento and hadn’t heard back from her friend, either.

Ben had deemed it “interesting,” and then added, “You’ll get your saddle under you with the next one.”

“So it’s not appealing?”

He shrugged. “What do I know about novels and such? And firstfruits aren’t always the best.”

Then the reviews came, and she knew why her sisters and friends hadn’t known what to say. Newspaper editors did. “Bad taste” and “slang language”—“simplistic plot full of sickening love stories.” Tears seeped from her eyes as she read them. Harold Bunter wrote a scathing letter lamenting “Poor Mr. Duniway” married to such a wretched writer. Poor Ben!

The Argus, that had sold more advertisements and increased subscriptions from the letters from her “Farmer’s Wife,” wrote nothing at all. Not a single word of praise or piercing. They simply carried the ad and the price. It was the first commercially published book in the new state, and the Argus didn’t even do a story about that?

Ben stroked her arm as they sat side by side on the divan while she nursed Hubert. “Maybe it was your strident letters about men and their treatment of their women where you used your own name now and then, maybe that’s why people haven’t taken to the book.”

She wanted to blame someone for the disappointing response. I hate to hear what Harvey thinks, if he even reads it. “But my characters, at least one of them, is the proper wife, the one who wouldn’t speak in public or challenge her domineering employer, and eventually the lovers find each other again and marry. It’s a happy story. The husband’s not the villain, the employer is.”

“But the men don’t come out so well.”

“She has failures too. And her brother sends her to school. Some of the men are good.” She cried now—for the wasted hours writing, for the time away from the children and from Ben, and for what? “It’s all rubbish.”

“Jenny, Jenny.” He pulled her closer. “Celebrate that you not only delivered a child, a ‘little man,’ a future voter in the cradle as you put what mothers do—”

“That might have been too forceful,” Jenny said. “About women making voters and not just giving birth. My last ‘Farmer’s Wife’ might have turned some readers away.”

“I think you write better about real things than imagined ones. You birthed a book while teaching and taking care of the little ones and me. That’s quite an accomplishment, Mrs. Duniway. Quite amazing indeed.”

“Everything didn’t turn out all right, now did it?”

“It’s what comes after that matters,” Ben said. He thumbed her lashes and brushed her cheeks of tears. “Best thing to do when you’re bucked off a horse is to get back on. Ride another one.”

“You think so?”

“I do. You found satisfaction in the work, didn’t you? Isn’t that part of your scribbling? It can’t be all about how others like it or don’t. You’ll learn from this.”

She wiped her eyes. The pain ached, made her wince as she took a deep breath. “Will I learn something from this?” The scathing reviews cut like a knife, but the wounds would heal and she’d see what she could do differently in the next novel. She might have to publish it herself and anonymously write a good review. But first she’d read those rotten rejections to glean what she could learn from them. Yes. That’s one way to make things turn out better. Learn. It was the only surety she could count on.