Chapter 14: Letter From Home

 

Wednesday, August 2nd—Today is warm. Harvest has begun. Tanner is mowing hay today and will be reaping wheat and oats soon. I am out of flour and must go to Oregon City.

 

Hatty and Jenny usually worked with Tanner in the fields now, but Jenny couldn’t wait for her own grain to be milled. She would have to buy the high-priced flour at Abernethy’s store. She also needed cotton yardage to make more clothes for William. At eleven months, he’d outgrown the shirts she’d made before he was born.

Jenny harnessed Poulette to the wagon and started for Oregon City. Hatty Tanner and Otis rode with her, and Hatty held William. They picked up Esther and her babies on her way to Oregon City. When the group arrived at the general store, they learned mail had been delivered to another store down the street.

“I’ll go ask if we have any letters,” Esther volunteered. “Joel said he’d write when he got to San Francisco.” She took Cordelia with her.

While Esther was gone, Jenny browsed the dry goods. “Not much selection,” she commented, seeing only two bolts of calico on the shelves.

“Everything’s going to California,” Mr. Hamilton, the store clerk, said. “Ships stop there, don’t bother coming north. We can’t get supplies.”

“Any fresh food?” Jenny asked.

“Got some fruit from the Sandwich Islands. One ship came to Astoria to load up on wood for California. Every store in Oregon’s bidding on the little bit that comes our way.”

Jenny picked over the fruit, but almost everything was soft after the long ocean voyage. She’d make do with berries. The balance she owed at Abernethy’s store was growing, though she should be able to buy on credit through harvest.

“I’ll only take the cornmeal. And two yards of blue cotton and two more of brown,” she told Hamilton.

While the clerk added the purchases to her account, she turned to Hatty. “Good thing our wheat is almost to the mill. Until then, we’ll eat cornbread. I hope Tanner can catch some fish or take time off from the fields to hunt.”

“I’ll fish, Miz Jenny,” Otis said with a grin.

“You going to pay down your account soon?” Hamilton asked. “Your balance is getting mighty high,”

“It was paid off in early March, Mr. Hamilton,” Jenny said. “Most folks aren’t settling with you until the crops come in.”

“You ain’t given anything since your husband left in early March,” he told her. “When’s he coming back?”

Jenny forced a smile at the man. “I’ll pay after harvest, like everyone else.” She could use Mac’s coins if she had to, but she didn’t want to settle her balance if the store wasn’t making others pay.

Hamilton lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

Esther returned, holding Cordelia in the crook of one arm and waving letters in her other hand. “Jenny, there’s a letter for you and one for Pa.”

Jenny’s heart leapt. Had Mac finally written? She wanted to know how he was and what he was doing.

Esther prattled on, “Pa’s must be from Joel. I can’t wait to hear what he’s written. Is yours from Captain McDougall? I barely knew it was for you—till I remembered your name is really Geneviève and your maiden name was Calhoun. But why wouldn’t the Captain address it to Geneviève McDougall?”

Jenny took the letter Esther handed her. “Geneviève Calhoun, Oregon City,” the perfect script read.

Jenny shook her head. “It’s my mother’s writing.”

“Your mother,” Esther sighed. “You must be so glad to hear from her. How I wish I could get a letter from my ma.”

“I wrote her from Whitman Mission when William was born. This is the first letter I’ve had from her since I left Missouri.” Jenny hadn’t seen her mother since the day she ran away with Mac. Her mother, at the time expecting a child herself after her second marriage, had blamed Jenny for becoming enceinte, thinking Jenny had taken up with a neighbor boy. What had her mother’s reaction been to learning she had a grandson?

Jenny waited until she was home to open the letter. It was dated in March, four months earlier.

 

Chère Geneviève,

I received your letter last week via a steamship from Nouvelle Orléans. I am pleased you have a son and I know your cher papa smiles down from heaven to know you named your son William after him.

I, too, was delivered of a son, born on May 29, 1847. I named him Jacques after my father, though Mr. Peterson calls him Jack. Jacques is a fine, strong baby, and looks very like his father.

Mr. Peterson manages the farm well, and with the tobacco and corn crops and the income from his tavern, we prosper. It is a shame you cannot have the advantage of Mr. Peterson’s business faculties. How different he is from your papa! Mr. Peterson may not be an educated man, but he is well suited for life in Missouri.

I cannot imagine the rigors of your journey West, nor the bleak conditions of your life in Oregon Territory. You did not mention your husband in your letter, but I hope you have the protection of a strong man, as I do.

The circumstances of your leaving were unfortunate, but I pray you are happy now, where you and your son can live without the opprobrium you would have faced in Missouri.

Letitia sends her regards to you and your child.

Affectionately, ta mère,

Hortense Peterson

 

Jenny shivered when she finished the letter. Her mother did not know Jenny had been raped, nor that Bart Peterson was one of the rapists. He might have fathered William as well as Jacques. Jenny did not want Mr. Peterson nor his business faculties in her life. She was better off alone than in Peterson’s household.

Her mother had always lived in a world of her own concoction—a world that ignored ugliness and squalor. Hortense had been raised on a wealthy plantation in Louisiana and had tried to maintain the same lifestyle on the farm in Missouri. She’d tried to ignore her first husband’s illness, leaving his care to Jenny and their slave Letitia. After Jenny’s father died, Mama quickly married Bart Peterson, not seeing—or overlooking—how Peterson leered at Jenny and touched her whenever she passed him in the hall. Jenny had never understood why her mother married the man.

It was clear her mother did not want Jenny to return to Missouri. Mama expressed no desire to see either Jenny or her grandson. No matter, Jenny thought. Her life was in Oregon, and she would never again have to deal with Bart Peterson.

She put the letter on the mantel. She would answer it later—the parts she could answer. She could not tell her mother about a husband who did not exist.

The next morning Esther walked over to Jenny’s cabin with Cordelia. “Rachel’s minding Jonah,” she said. “I left him with Pa and Mother Amanda last night.”

“Mother Amanda?” Jenny asked. “Is that what you’re calling Mrs. Purcell—I mean, Mrs. Pershing?”

Esther grimaced. “You see the problem? I can’t call her ‘ma,’ like her brood does. Nor ‘Mrs. Pershing,’ though I suppose everyone else will.”

“I have a hard time calling her ‘Mrs. Pershing,’ too,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “I’ll always remember your mama fondly.”

“What did your ma say in her letter?”

Jenny shrugged. “Was glad to know I had a baby boy. She had one, too. Named him Jacques.”

“That’s all?”

“She fears our life in Oregon is harsh.”

Esther laughed. “It’s dirty and the work is hard, and we don’t have nice houses like in the States. But at least the land is good. Daniel was telling me this morning the wheat’s taller than what he grew back East. I just wish the stores had more calico. I’ve had to cut down Noah’s threadbare shirts for Jonah and Cordelia.”

“Was your papa’s letter from Joel?” Jenny asked.

“Yes, indeed. From Sutter’s Fort. He never made it to San Francisco. He was on his way to the gold fields when he mailed it. Says the fort was full of prospectors, all seeking gold dust and nuggets. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he found gold?”

Jenny smiled. Esther would always hope for more in life.

That evening after supper, Jenny sat at her table with paper, ink, and quill, an oil lamp lit in front of her. Hatty washed the dishes by the fireplace, and Otis played with William on the floor.

But she paused before she wrote. When she’d written her mother from Whitman Mission, she’d only told her mother Mac was the wagon captain. Now she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t tell her mother she and Mac had not married. She couldn’t tell her mother Mac had left her. There was little she cared to tell her mother, though she wished desperately for someone to know her story.

But not even Esther or the Tanners knew. Only Doc and Mrs. Tuller.

With a deep sigh, Jenny began writing:

 

August 3, 1848
Chère Maman,

I congratulate you on your son Jacques, and hope he is as much a joy to you as William is to me. William is crawling and pulls himself up on the table legs. He is almost eleven months old and will be walking soon. He looks more and more like Papa every day. He babbles to himself. I think he tries to say “Mama” to me, though that may be my imagination.

The wheat harvest from our first year’s planting has just begun, with corn to follow. A Negro man named Tanner works the fields with his boy Otis, and his wife helps me cook and clean. All my neighbors from our wagon train are nearby, and we often work together.

I’m sure by the time you receive this letter you will have learned gold has been found in California. It is all one hears about in Oregon. Many of our men have left to prospect. But I am happy in my little house with William and the Tanners.

May God be with you,

Your daughter,

Geneviève

 

Jenny sealed the letter and set it aside to mail on her next trip to Oregon City. Writing her mother such a formal letter—one omitting all mention of Mac—seemed to sever the possibility of returning to her past life. It felt like leaving Missouri all over again.