SEVENTEEN
Misfortune’s Middle Name
1865
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Abigail’s next novel started the morning after that suffrage conversation. It took on the message of freedom for women by building the case for a woman’s right to vote. Women were capable of birthing citizens in a cradle and raising them up, so they ought to be hardy and smart enough to vote about a school board position or who ought to be president. She planned to work such arguments into a plot. She was invigorated and gave Ben’s sage advice and that directional beam of light the credit.
She felt a new energy in her classroom lessons. She chatted longer with the parents of her students, especially the women, to get a feel for how her arguments landed on men’s and women’s heads. She started wearing a white silk scarf held at her bodice with a fancy pin to offset the dark clothes she wore. She felt in constant mourning, so black linsey-woolsey made sense, but the dark colors also weathered the tendering in the wash tubs better than the bleached cloth the hot summer sun forced her to don. She posted a sign about her sewing abilities, deciding that stitching other than quilts would be a good way to earn extra cash—but also give her time with women, a chance to listen to their interests to better incorporate a strategy for how to secure them the vote. The idea of a newspaper would stay a pipe dream.
She used her editor letters to start her campaign. Spoke with her next-door neighbor, carefully bringing up the subject of suffrage, and found there were others like herself, contented wives who wished for more. Oh, yes, she had a hundred ideas now that the focus of her energy was so clear. She loved the organizing, the idea-generating, pulse-driving joy of knowing where she was headed and having a path forward, even if she had to push the boulders out of the way herself. Ben’s temperament, too, had lightened with his work with his horses again. There was singing in the house. His occasional sales of both washing machines and matched teams took her farther from her fears of poverty. She felt secure for the first time in years.
Through the opening in the glass door, she watched the sheriff walk up the steps. “What now?” she asked. She often made the sheriff a villain in the drafts of her novels. The one she worked on now had such a character.
“There’s been an accident, Mrs. Duniway.” Abigail’s eyes scanned the room: all children were present and accounted for.
“Ben? My sisters?”
“Ben.” He held his hat in his hand and didn’t look at her.
“Where? What happened. Children. Class dismissed.” She reached for Wilkie, who had been playing quietly in the back of the classroom, something he did when Ben was either in his workshop or at the farm with the horses, which was where he should have been and was now. Why when things are going so well does disaster always strike?
“I’ll take you to the doctor.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Clara. Watch them all.”
Abigail rushed through the house, jammed a hat on her head, grabbed her purse, and went through the door the sheriff held open for her. She pressed the silk scarf at her throat, gaining small comfort from the softness. She waited to pepper the sheriff for answers until they were in the carriage. Spring birds chirped.
“Best I know, missus, is he was tossed from a wagon when a team he was working broke loose. They trampled him, the wagon straight across his back. Soft earth from the spring rains might have saved his life.”
She breathed her prayers, trying not to chastise a God who allowed these tragedies, over and over. Financial strain. Ben’s depression. Her own physical depletion, the joint aches the doctors named rheumatoid arthritis. Now this, when they were moving forward, had found a good routine and rhythm. At least he’s alive. At least he’s alive.
“Broken back,” the doctor said. “I’ve given him laudanum for the pain. He’ll need to be kept quiet. Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any organ damage, just broken vertebrae from what I can determine by the feel of his spine.”
“Just broken vertebrae.” Her sarcasm appeared lost on the doctor. “Can he . . . will he walk?”
“Time will tell. Healing takes time.” The doctor patted her hand as she sat beside Ben’s bed at the doctor’s office, the distant clank of instruments on metal punctuations to her rushing heartbeat and the patter of his retreating shoes leaving them alone.
“Oh, Ben.” His eyes claimed hers.
“Sorry, Jenny.”
“I know you are.” She brushed hair from his forehead, watched the bruising spread before her eyes on his cheeks, even his hands. He forced a weak smile. She could only imagine what his back looked like.
“What’ll we do?” Ben whispered through the laudanum haze.
“Right now, you’ll heal. We’ll pray your spine will hold you up again and you’ll be back fit as a fiddle. I’m sure of it.” No, I’m not. But she knew that he drew from her confidence. “You rest now. We’ll be fine.” She put all thoughts of the future aside and laid her head down on the bedside, breathed a prayer of gratitude that he was alive. They’d find a way to work things out, God willing. At least they didn’t have Sunny Hillside Farm to take care of.
Ben’s pain was like an uninvited guest who came to dinner, had to be accommodated, then stayed well past the promised departure time. In fact, Abigail began to wonder if there would be a departure time. He was a good patient, asked to be allowed to lift hand irons so he wouldn’t lose arm strength. He let the nurses help him stand. He joked with them and made them laugh. Then when they left, he sighed to Abigail, leaned on her. “Will I ever walk again?”
She wanted time with that cheerful Ben who made the nurses and doctors grin with his stories. Instead she got needy Ben. Then she chastised herself for even lamenting her frustrations when he was dealing with broken bones and who knew what he might not be able to ever do again. He’d lost—at least temporarily—what he cherished: time with his horses and tossing Wilkie in the air to catch him. He could look forward to . . . what? Neither of them knew.
“John and Harvey have moved a bed into the parlor downstairs. I kept the piano in there so Clara can practice and soothe you with music at the same time. She’s quite good. I think we can stop the lessons. She can even give them.”
“Hopefully we won’t need a disrupted house for long. I’ll be up. Lincoln’s won reelection. The war is over. Hope is in the air.”
“That’s the Ben I married.” She kissed him. “The doctors say you can come home any time we’re ready. There’s a chair with wheels to get you around, and John and Amos installed a board nicely smoothed by the boys you can pull on to get you upright and taking those steps.”
“I’ll miss the nurses offering aid.” He smiled at her.
“I’m sure you will. The children can help and I will. When I can.” She straightened his bedsheets, smoothed the pillowcase above his head. “I’ve been thinking, Ben. Albany’s a larger city than Lafayette, and with the war ending, business will boom. Albany’s got a steamboat stop from both north on the Willamette and south at Corvallis and the Calapooia. Bigger things are happening there. The Presbyterians have started a college and we could live right next door to the Fosters. You remember them? They had a house in Lafayette. And my sister Harriet lives in Albany now too, you remember.”
He looked thoughtfully at her. “I’ve got my friends where we are. When I’m better, I’d have to find a farm to work the horses instead of being able to use Capt John’s. Albany’s farther away.”
She didn’t correct him but thought if he ever worked horses again it would be a miracle—if not a terrible mistake.
“There’s a Union-leaning newspaper in Albany, giving the southern Democrats a run for their money. They already accepted a couple of my letters.”
“Ah,” Ben said.
“And we can purchase a bigger house there.” She pulled a chair up beside him. The room smelled of disinfectant. “I’ve been thinking.”
“No doubt.”
“If we sell the school now, we’ll make a profit. I’ve been looking over the figures. Plus, the extra room at this newer house I’ve found could be used for a retail operation, and there’s . . . a bedroom on the main floor, to accommodate you. Us.”
“You’ve located a house? When did you ever find the time? Oh. Sure. I’ve been here and you’ve been, well, carrying on.”
“Didn’t you expect me to?”
“No. Yes. Of course. It’s what you do, thank goodness.”
“I hand-delivered my letter to the paper a few weeks back and had time to talk with an agent.” She looked away. “The house is perfect, Ben. A much bigger attic space. We could take in six boarders.”
“I’ve a plan.”
“You usually do. But leave Lafayette and our friends? Couldn’t your plan involve where we are now?”
“You’ll make new friends. You’re good at that. Kate says I don’t praise you enough for your many gifts.”
“Bless Kate.”
“I do. You do make friends easily and you keep them. Yes, they take advantage of you—at times.” She added that last when he began to protest. “But your goodwill softens my shrill.”
“Goodwill over shrill. I’ll remember that.”
“It’ll serve you well in Albany. And we have to do some things differently now, Ben. You won’t be able to . . . add to the teapot. At least for a time. We have to take advantage of the market. We must hire a nurse to help. Someone for you to flirt with when your old wifey is busy.”
“You’re the only one I want to help me walk again.”
“I know.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it. “Go ahead and get your house. You probably already have.”
The teapot was the last of the items Abigail packed as the Scott sisters and their husbands helped the Duniways move. Again. The teapot sat proudly on the mantel over the fireplace in their new Albany home. It had coins in it again.
She might have exaggerated to Ben in a small way. The profit wasn’t much from the sale of the school but sufficient to get them started. They’d still have to pinch their pennies, but she wanted to continue her newspaper subscriptions. She needed to see how the rest of the country was working on women’s suffrage and how Oregon’s campaigns would be different. But in Albany she could have conversations with the instructors at the college. She could debate with friends as well as those who saw the world differently than she did. She did love the intellectual pursuit. She might not have a Pacific University education like her brother, but she could go head-to-head with Harvey on current events around the world as well as at home, she was certain of that. He might have an advantage as he studied law now, too, in addition to having access to every book in that Portland library collection. She wished Ben liked to read more, but his was an oral tradition, telling stories rather than reading them.
Perhaps the move was more for her than for the rest of the family, though the extra space did help Ben move more easily, first with the wheeled chair and then with canes. The children would adjust. They had Scott blood in them and knew how to persevere. The Duniway side seemed a bit more fragile. She had to remember that as she watched Ben sigh when he looked over the financial sheets she’d showed him and told him of loose boards in the attic. The house’s foundation was sound, but the roof would need buttressing.
Abigail hired men to fix rafters, put old newspapers for insulation in the walls, readied the attic for additional boarders while she drew out on paper how she wanted the largest room on the first floor converted. “We’ll put the glass case here, where one can stand behind it and take out the beaded purses from the back.
“I can build those cases.”
“Can you?” She hadn’t thought he could do such work. “That would be wonderful, Ben.”
“It’ll take me a little time.” Ben stood steadied by two canes. “Willis can help. And Hubert. I can sit.”
“Then we’ll have clothes trees along that back wall where we can shape wires to hold the ready-made dresses. They’ll be hung rather than folded, giving a better view of the handiwork from the moment people come into the store. Fortunately, there’s a separate entrance, so people won’t need to tromp through the house.”
“I can twist wires into round shapes to hold the hats.” Clara showed her parents one she’d made.
“That’s perfect. They can be bookends on the glass cases. We need to make the counters wide enough to accommodate the hat stands but also allow people to look down through to see the wares for sale.” She kissed the top of Clara’s head and gently touched the cascade of curls that fell to her nearly twelve-year-old shoulders. She’s beautiful. We need to be sure she finishes school and make suitors wait. “My creative daughter.”
“I can sew too, Momma.”
“Better than me, that’s for certain. But I want to hire out seamstresses, give Albany women money for their work. With the war over, we’ll have a booming business. Women like to have other women do the fitting and stitching. When you’re older.” She saw the disappointment. “You’ll do well behind the counters, Clara. You could knit a purse or two. That would add to the stock.”
“What stock?” Ben said.
“My kind of stock is going to come from my teapot nest egg. I’m taking my thirty dollars and heading on the steamboat to Portland to meet with Jacob Mayer. He’s that retail genius in Portland where things are booming too. I’m going to ask for a loan, then head to San Francisco and get the latest frocks and unmentionables, needles and threads, and felted hats.”
“A loan.”
“Yes. I can show him how I can repay him. I’ve got the numbers all worked out. You’re making progress. It won’t be long, and you’ll be contributing better than you did before. The pain is less, isn’t it?”
“It comes and goes. The laudanum helps.”
“At least there’s something.” She didn’t like him taking the liquid because it made him so sleepy. But life was a balance. Without it he suffered; with it, more often than not, he lay in the shadows.
“You’re leaving me behind, Mrs. Duniway.”
“No, I’m not. I’m moving us forward. You’re right with me. You checked the figures. I’ll build up a way to push for suffrage—my way. No parades or crazy-marching women holding signs. My way is a ‘still hunt.’ Quiet coercion of men in power and men in general to be less frightened by women. I need capital to do that. I think Jacob Mayer has a nose for investments, and I want ours to be his next. But I can’t do it without your approval.”
He shook his head. “You can. I wish I could help more. You won’t need me in the end.”
A flash of anger surged through her. Why do I have to prop you up? Don’t I have enough to do?
“I’ll always need you, Ben. You’re my rock. You keep me out of trouble. Well, sometimes. People love you. They tolerate me.”
“You’re strong enough not to care.”
“Oh, I care. But I can’t let it deter me from my task.”
“Being the breadwinner. Yes. I know. I’m so sorry.”
“Making a difference for women, Ben. That’s the task. And you help with that by progressing, being there for the children and letting me be me despite the boulders I uncover on this journey we’re on. Now, you work on your exercises while I head to Portland. And say a prayer that Mr. Mayer will have the vision to support Albany’s newest millinery.”