THIRTY-ONE
The Things That Sustain

1885

_______

“A little old age, Ma,” Willis had said.

“How old is he?” Hubert’s wife asked.

“Barely fifty-five,” Abigail said. “He worries me.”

“He seems to know details of the past.” Wilke bit a radish, crunched it.

“Yes, but what he did yesterday or even a moment ago escapes him.” Abigail sighed. “The other day, he stood right next to me when Clara Belle was here telling us that she and Don and Earl were considering moving back to Oregon.”

“I wonder why they’d do that?” Hubert said.

“We chatted about it. Little Earl didn’t look well, if you ask me, but she said it had to do with Don’s work, whatever that is. The man is so elusive. Ben was there, heard it all. Clara Belle walked away, and I said to him, ‘Won’t that be lovely if Clara Belle and Earl come back home?’ and he said, ‘Clara Belle’s moving home? Why didn’t I know about that?’ I mean, he had been listening to the conversation. Not thirty seconds had passed.”

Into the silence that followed, Hubert said, “That is concerning. But he’s no trouble, really, is he, Ma? He takes care of his needs. And it’s only temporary. It’s just a quirk, maybe. Of old age.”

“He’s tidy about his person, as always. Dignified in that.” She felt torn between a growing interest in getting back into the arena while watching Ben wane. “I worry that he might get lost if he goes out alone. And there’s his job. How long will he be able to keep it? And he asks me repeated questions. I’m not much for patience, you know.”

“You might have to stay home a little more, Ma.”

A leaf falling from a tree to the forest floor would have been louder than the silence that followed Willis’s observation.

“You might have to sell a few more subscriptions,” she snapped back. Inside, Abigail felt her throat close. How can I be so unloving as to fear more time with Ben? And why does suffrage work offer more sustenance than caring for a loving man? She used the travel to escape; she could see that now. Ben had recognized it before she had. And he’d encouraged it. He knew her better than she knew herself.

He had treated it with hot lemon. For months. Don Stearns had seen the symptoms, he told Ben and Abigail, and thought that it was a deep cold from the vapors off Lake Camus where he’d moved his little family.

“But you’re still living in that swamp. If you had but told me, we would have gotten a doctor there or brought you all here. Sooner. How could you not see it was consumption?”

She had to find someone to blame. Had to. Her daughter was dying and there was nothing she could do about it.

She picked up doilies from the back of the horsehair couch, smoothed them, moved them, her fingers hopelessly busy over nothing. This inability to make things happen—to improve Ben’s memory, protect her daughter, gain the vote for women after all her effort, sacrifice, and yes, time away from family—her life was as useless as these doilies.

“Maybe I’ll recover, Momma.” Clara Belle hacked out the words, the act of talking bringing on a wracking cough that brought pain to Clara’s face and to Abigail’s heart.

“Of course you will. You must. If only we’d known. We could have found a mountain place with pure air to bring you healing. Why didn’t you write, Clara?” She turned to her son-in-law. “Why didn’t you?” She ignored the tears he brushed from his cheeks, didn’t give him a chance to defend. “You . . . you need to go, Don. I can barely stand the sight of you. Earl will stay here. He needs to be close to his mother now, emotionally, if not able to touch and hold her.”

“It would be better if he came home with me. He’s my son.”

“No. We need to watch for symptoms for him. It’s clear your diagnostic abilities are lacking.”

“As are your mothering aptitudes,” he choked out.

Abigail gasped. “How dare—”

“Jenny . . .” Ben reached for her hand.

“I brought Clara here at her insistence, but I’ll not give up Earl.”

“Please.” Clara Belle coughed. She turned her eyes toward her father. “Don’t let them argue.” Her lips tinted blue with the effort to stay her shallow breath.

Ben was having one of his good days. “Jenny, Clara Belle doesn’t need any more troubling.” He sat on a chair beside the daybed she lay on, the very one he’d rested on after the horse accident while they all listened to her playing the piano. No more. “What would please you, Daughter? To have Earl here?” She nodded yes. “And Don?” She hesitated but nodded yes to that as well. “Son, you are welcome to stay.”

“Ben.”

He raised his hand to silence Abigail. To the Stearns family members, he said, “Jenny’s grieving. She has a sharp tongue sometimes, but it’s how she plugs the hole of pain. If you want to be here with Clara Belle, you’re welcome. No need to separate the family.”

Abigail snorted, but she saw the pleading look upon her daughter’s face, and she inhaled. “You can remain. Of course. All of you.”

Don’s eyes were on Clara Belle. “I fear our feuding would bring you stress. I’ll come often. I promise.”

Abigail couldn’t let Don be the better person. “Ben’s right. What matters now is Clara’s peace and healing. We can pray and hope,” she said. “You’re welcome here, Don.”

“Then we’ll stay for you, Clara Belle.”

A feeble smile crossed her daughter’s face. She pressed her hands in prayer and nodded to him, her mother, and then to her father. Speaking was simply too tiring. Abigail could see that, and she’d need to remember it, not upset her daughter. It only made her weaker.

And yet her outrage at Don for not calling a doctor, for waiting so long, for taking her away from them those years before and the piercing sorrow of such an imminent loss as a child’s death would not be enough to caution her every time. She would rail at this man who, like Maggie’s husband, had ignored the signs of illness until too late. The very sight of him would bring out the worst in her.

“I’ve got to make that meeting back east,” Abigail told Ben that evening.

“You can’t leave. Not now.”

“You’re a greater comfort to her than I am. You and the boys. She said to me, ‘You have a mission, Ma.’ She understands.”

“Not just for her sake, Abigail. But for yours, you should be here. You could read your latest novels to her. She’ll enjoy hearing Hubert’s wife giving piano lessons, just as she once did, and you can enjoy the music too.”

“I feel helpless here, and frankly, the very sight of Don . . .”

Ben patted her back, then took her into his arms. “My Jenny. How you miss the things nearby. Can’t you see there is no real joy in the things afar?”

“You’re remembering that little autograph book poem. The second line though is ‘Not what we seem, but what we are.’ I’m not the loving parent that you are, Ben. I’m a demanding, domineering, controlling—”

“Stop. Don’t punish yourself that way. Who you are is a devoted, benevolent, and loving mother who pushes grief away. Didn’t you read to me what Shakespeare wrote, that one should give sorrow words?”

She nodded, tears dampening his shirt.

“It was something about if you don’t speak what your heart feels, it will break. Silence isn’t always a good thing, if I recall it.”

“Yes. Macbeth. But when I speak, it comes out stinging. I’m better to be away, Ben. You’re here. You’ll comfort her. The things afar will bring me consolation in the end.”

“No. They won’t.”

Abigail packed her bags while Ben sang old songs to Clara Belle. Earl watched as Abigail folded her dresses, put her curling iron, powders, and perfume into the burgundy bag she had carried with her through the years. “You look after your grandpa now, you hear? Make sure he doesn’t go outside without his coat. Evenings can get cold. Will you remember that?”

Earl nodded. She hugged him, his thin little shoulders like a bird’s frame. She would fatten him up when she came back. She knew when she returned, all would be different, but she would do all she could to keep Earl with them. She had to. His father lacked the proper judgment to raise a child. Anyone could see that. It would comfort Clara Belle in the hereafter to know that her son was safe. She had already begun that campaign by letting Don and Earl remain and removing herself as a point of contention so her daughter wasn’t disturbed in the last days of her life. One had to begin a campaign for change long before one thought one should.

Abigail found little peace in this latest trip back east. The division between temperance and suffrage and prohibition swirled around the eastern cities and in the halls of women gathering. When asked to speak, she sounded defensive, she knew, but she’d been accused of taking money from the liquor industry—she hadn’t. Her having championed the plight of a brewer’s widow in Walla Walla, Washington, a story she’d told in her speech, had gotten her labeled as a traitor to the cause of controlling the blight of alcohol, betraying the temperance movement. Her colleagues couldn’t seem to understand that she cared about the property rights of women too, not only their right to vote. She supported even widows of brewers who’d been left with debt by a brewer husband. Abigail advocated helping the woman turn the brewery into a cannery or develop another kind of business that would help the community and this woman. But no, because she was associated with hops and foam, Abigail was labeled as a traitor.

She penned a letter to Shirley.

The hardest thing is that I’m supposed to be a communicator, someone who, with written and spoken word, can express difficult perspectives facing us. But I am failing at this. I can’t seem to find the handle of this pot so that I can remove it from the heat. I fear Washington Territory will repeal the vote for women because our fair sex are indeed voting for prohibition.

I am lonely here in this eastern city of government, sitting on a park bench beneath a canopy of trees. I am misunderstood and I begin to see that it is my own fault. But I lack the wisdom, my dear friend, to know what to do about it. And my usual rebirth is clouded with grief for Clara Belle’s impending death, for all I didn’t do and might have and now it’s too late. I can only pray that one day I will find a way to be understood, by myself, if not by those around me.

It happened that Abigail was home when Clara Belle breathed her last; Don wasn’t there. He’d gone back to Washougal to tend to business, and so on that late January day in 1886, Abigail sat stern-faced as Ben sang “Rock of Ages” to his daughter. Clara Belle’s eyes were closed with the smallest flutter of her eyelids now and then to suggest that she heard. And then the certainty of it caught Abigail by the throat, her sob swallowed so as not to have Clara hear it. She held her daughter’s hand, rubbed her palm, and prayed, oh she prayed! Her brothers sat around the bed, heads bowed, hands clasped between their knees. Hubert’s wife accompanied Ben’s singing, and he looked strong beside Clara and her labored breathing, and Abigail prayed that her daughter’s suffering would end soon, as the pain of watching, listening, of powerlessness wore upon them as the coming of a heavy storm.

She had thought once that losing the vote had been like losing a child. It was nothing like it. Outliving the flesh of one’s flesh was a grief like no other. There was no map to follow, no way to get over the pain, only try to find a way through. She and Ben and the mothers and fathers of deceased children walked in a wilderness, far away from any promised land.

“I’m going to visit Shirley,” she told Ben. “The air in San Francisco will perk me up. Should I take Earl with me?”

“Leave him be. He’s getting into a routine here. And he’s a good help to me. Reminds me of things.”

She felt a tinge of guilt but slipped over it. Clara Belle had been buried, and Don had returned to Washougal, reluctantly leaving Earl behind.

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary, Don.” Abigail had tugged at her black neck scarf. “We’ve had nieces and nephews and the sons of friends stay with us for a time. You’d have to hire a nanny or someone to look after him. Visit anytime.”

Defeated, Don had left his son behind.

“I asked Earl to remind you to put your coat on in the evening.” Abigail washed an ink stain from her fingers as she spoke to Ben. A dove cooed in the elm tree.

“Oh, yes, he does that. But he also notices if I’ve already eaten a bowl of mush when I ask Chen why he hasn’t gotten breakfast out for us yet.” Ben chuckled. “Craziest thing.” He shook his head. “I guess food doesn’t taste all that good if I can’t remember that I just ate it.”

Shirley welcomed her, and Abigail felt the greatest comfort in the arms of an old friend who had lived a lifetime with another kind of lost child. She and her husband Eloi had children together, but her eldest daughter—now grown with children of her own—was still the heart-child. That girl, taken from her by the legal system, had given Shirley direction toward helping women seek their rights in divorces they had not wanted and been unjustly granted. Eloi, with his dark hair and gentle eyes, would put his arm around Shirley as they talked, a gesture of protection.

“Clara Belle’s last words were that I needed to get back into the fight. She said she was going on ahead and that I had work to do here. But I’m not sure how to do it now.”

“It’ll come to you, Jenny. You’re in an understandable slump. Such a disappointment to you—Clara Belle’s death, losing that vote.”

“It was. But I snapped back, or so I thought. And then encountered the tension back east that doesn’t appear to be going away. I seem to be the crux of the contention. My outspoken views at the conventions about us not lining up with prohibitionists. And then my writings.”

“Maybe you should do what you always wanted to do and just write your poems and novels.”

“I can’t support myself on that.”

“You could sell the New Northwest.”

She stood thoughtful, the waning sun sending glittering reddish light across the bay. “But how would I carry on the mission that Clara Belle wanted for me?”

“Edit someone else’s newspaper. Kate’s doing that. Write for someone else, earn a salary.”

“Oh my, who would hire this outspoken old woman?” The friends laughed.

“You’re not old.”

“But I am outspoken.”

“It’s who you are. You’re a reformer, Jenny. An activist. You see injustice and must act on that. The way you do it can change through the years. With less stress from the newspaper, you could give more time to your speaking and even publish a collection of your speeches, to inspire others to keep the faith. What is it you always say—‘the world is moving and women are moving with it’? We just move differently, to adapt to the times.”

Shirley’s words formed a knot at the end of a thread that Abigail could imagine pulling through a new cloth.

“I’d have to talk to the boys. And Ben, of course. He talks about Idaho and the Lost Valley. It is beautiful country, and with water, we might grow crops. I convinced him that if I could write in a dusty stagecoach stop, I could surely write in a cabin shadowed by mountains while streams rushed nearby.” She’d even thought it might become a gathering place for campaigns. Perhaps offer refuge for women and children in need, but she didn’t think Ben would go for that. Is that the way my mission to elevate women will take now? I’ll advance the place of women in public life by retreating into a wilderness? Her prayers asked for guidance.

She called a family gathering as soon as she returned to Portland.

“What would you do, Ma?”

“Why, find a ranch in Idaho, as you boys and Ben have been touting for some time now. We could all move there. I’d find my little ‘lodge in the wilderness’ and write. I could be a correspondent to the new buyer, and Idaho still doesn’t have the vote. Yet. They could use me. And of course, I can travel back here, stay with Kate or Harriet or Fanny or Sarah Maria. Goodness, what’s the benefit of all those sisters if one can’t impose upon them from time to time—not to mention nieces and nephews.”

“Earl would like it, though I doubt Stearns would,” Hubert said.

“Should we tell her, Pa?” Clyde asked. Her second youngest son was sixteen already. He had a beard. How had her boys grown up without her noticing?

“Tell me what?”

“We’ve already found a place that Pa likes. I like it too,” Ralph told her. “Hubert took him last week.”

So that’s why the Idaho images were so readily available to Ben.

“We were trying to figure out how to buy it, but now, if we sell the paper, we could do that.” Hubert added, “We boys made a down payment on it.”

“You bought something without my even agreeing to it? Not knowing if you could pay for it?” Encumbering me? “Ben?” What has happened to our partnership? “When were you going to let me know?”

“I quit the customhouse, Jenny. It was time. I couldn’t . . . well, I forgot important things.”

Like telling me you’d resigned.

“Earl and Hubert and me, we went to Idaho. You were traveling like you do.” He grinned. “I didn’t take your teapot money, Jenny.”

Shame washed over her. She hadn’t been aware that Ben’s problems had become severe enough that he had recognized his need to quit work. They hadn’t even discussed it. As usual, she had been so involved in her own world afar that she hadn’t seen what was happening nearby.

Yes, Clara Belle’s death had come during that time, and travel had been a way of her grieving. But Ben grieved too.

“Oh, Ben. I . . . you could have telegraphed me at Shirley’s. I would have come home.”

“You needed your time there. You always come back with new ideas. And it happened.” He looked around the room at their sons and Earl. “Where’s Cora? She always fixes my evening cocoa.”

“It’s not night yet, Grandpa.” Earl eased up beside Ben.

They’ve moved on without me.

The swirl of getting the books in order filled her time: deciding whether to sell the presses separately or give a credit knowing new ones might be warranted. Deciding whether to put the house on the market too, how to let subscribers know about the changes. When she’d had any second thoughts about the sale of her work for the past sixteen years, the enthusiasm with which her sons were willing to divest of it kept her from being tearful. Even changes that resulted in things one wished for could carry heartbreak, she decided. At least Clara Belle didn’t have to see that her beloved Washington had repealed the woman’s vote when the Territorial Legislature found it unconstitutional. What had Shirley said when she pierced Abigail’s ears? “Pain comes before the glory.” She’d felt that when they left Hardscrabble Farm and when she sold the school and millinery. As with her other losses, she would grieve in time. And maybe these back-to-back devastations with Clara’s passing and the voting loss, perhaps in order to move forward, one needed things so upending.

With Ben, Wilke, Earl, and Hubert, they traveled to the Wood River district, east to Idaho. The land the boys had found for Ben had a large log cabin on it, with several bedrooms and a wide porch that wrapped around the house, offering a vista of green and snowcapped mountains they called the Lost River Range. It was in the Pashimeroi Valley. They’d made a good purchase. The expanse caused her to take in deep breaths. This would be a healing place; she could feel it.

“What would you say about using the bunkhouse to house women and children in need? We could perhaps start a utopian community like the Aurora colony, where all are equal and—”

“Ma. No,” Wilke said. He put his hand up to stop her. “This is our place, not the whole world’s.”

Yes, this would be a space to get away from the world, to stop rehashing the arguments at National, put away the sting of the charges made against her as being in the hands of the liquor industry. Breaking with Aunt Susan had been painful. She hated being misunderstood. Here, she could be heard again, write with more clarity. She had written a letter to Shirley about the planned move but also pouring out the anguish of Clara’s loss and her trouble with National. “I will die as I have lived, misunderstood by those I love best and serve most.”

She sat on the porch steps while Ben smoked his pipe from a rocking chair downwind of her. Can I really give it all up to come here? Her stomach tightened at the uncertainty that clutched at her. She felt most in control when she drew her own map, and this move had only vapors of that. She remembered asking her students once to define powerful, giving her definition first. “I think it’s a word that means one can set a goal and then figure out how to make it happen.” That was being powerful.

But her students had told her no, it was wealth. Another boy said, “No, when you’re big and strong like Mr. Duniway, that’s powerful.” But it had been the smallest child, the quiet one, who had taken her breath away.

“I think powerful is when you want to quit but you keep going.”

Maybe there’d be enough with the sale to pay for the ranch and still have a small house in Portland, permit her to “keep going.” The winters might be brutal in this valley, and having a refuge among the association women of Portland could be her escape—if she found she needed it. A meadowlark flitted from a shrub. She’d have to learn the name of the plants and trees, and she’d become familiar with the sound of their dry leaves crinkling in the fall and discover how the Pashimeroi Valley got its name and what were the weather and the ways of this place. A neighboring rancher stopped by to explain a sound that was like horses crossing a creek. “Salmon spawning,” he’d told her. “Slapping the water as they splash over each other.”

“Imagine,” Abigail had said.

She rose and found her foolscap paper. They’d brought personal things with them on this trip. The “lodge in the wilderness,” as she began to call it, had come furnished with beds and linens and dishes and even a dog. They’d have to hire a cook and a housekeeper. She’d want time to write.

September 2, 1886. Blanche Le Clerq, a Tale of the Mountain Mines. It would be a novel about a wealthy mineowner who falls in love with Blanche, who refuses to marry him unless he accepts her passion for the stage and realizes that women can be public and wise and chaste and willing to rule with him and not over him.

“I’ve started another novel, Ben,” she called out to him after a time.

“I thought you owned a newspaper.”

“We did.” How many things will I need to repeat? “And I have another story to serialize for it. I’ll mail it from Ellis, Idaho, so Willis can get the first chapter into the next edition. He’s staying to help the new owner.”

Ben nodded and smiled at her. “This is good, Jenny. We’ll get horses once we move. We can do that, can’t we?”

We are moved. “Of course.”

He sighed. “I’ll have my two loves back again: you and my pintos.”

At least he put me first in the lineup of his loves. That was what she needed to do for him now too. Put him first. The vote for women would follow, surely, as inevitably as the mountains that rose before them. She’d spent her life doing something worth doing. She’d continue but in a new way from a new place. It was how the world moved and women with it.