Waiting, waiting, waiting. I am dog-tired of waiting. I wish this infernal trip had commenced weeks ago. Once I have set my mind to a thing, I do not like to wait. I prefer to get on with the task, even if it is as big as moving from Missouri to Oregon Territory. But wishing will not speed the plow. I am inclined to believe what Grandpa Barr used to say: “Wish in one hand, mess in t’other, see which fills faster.”
A poet he was not, but I will say he was usually more right than wrong.
In truth, I am in no hurry to leave this place, the only home Thomas and William and I have ever known. But even if there was a way to call a halt to the trip, I am not sure I would want to. I would never tell the boys that, as they think I am dead-set against this venture. And it does not pay to let your annoying brothers think they understand you.
After so many months, then weeks, then days, it is hardly believable we have come down to a short stack of hours. We are sleeping for the last time in the house my father and mother built themselves with little help from anyone else. They came to this place, Bloomington, Missouri (back when it was still known, and I do not jest, as Box Ankle), as a young couple, newly married, far from their families back east in New York.
Tomorrow, after living here for nearly eighteen years and raising three children on this farm, Papa will move the family forward, taking us farther still from everyone we know. But we will leave one behind, the most important of all. Mama. She will stay here, tended, or rather her grave will be tended, by Cousin Merdin and his young family.
Funny to think he used to pick on me whenever they’d visit for a special occasion, but look at us now. I am fourteen, and he is all grown up, has a wife in Ethel. I know I shouldn’t say it but she is a mousy thing, all bony fingers and shoulders, big eyes and pulled-back hair. It’s as if she might fall to pieces if she doesn’t keep everything about herself held like a fist, so tight the knuckles are white.
Of course, I expect any woman in her shoes would feel pinched, what with Merdin for a husband and those young’uns, a boy and a girl, if you please. Little Elmer and Ethel, the girl being named for her mama (now wouldn’t that be confusing?), are two of the most troublesome children I have ever met. They weren’t here ten minutes this afternoon when they turned loose all the hens I had spent an hour shooing back into the coop. I needed them in there so I could gather up the six we planned on taking along before we lit out in the morning.
I about swore a blue streak, but kept my teeth tight, especially when those youngsters hugged their skinny mama’s skirts and all but dared me to light into them. And I would have, too, bony Ethel or no, but Papa caught my eye across the dooryard and stared me down. He did it as he always does, silent-like in that way he has of saying a whole lot without saying anything at all. He sort of looks down his long nose, lips off to one side as if he is considering a purchase. But it’s his eyes that say it all. I laid off them kids and went about gathering the hens. And all the while Ethel’s cooing and hugging her varmints because she thinks the chickens gave them a fright.
Those twins are playing her like a tight-strung violin. Good luck on the farm, I say.
I see I am stomping a path around the real reason I wanted to write in my new journal tonight, but all I can think of is how sad we will be come morning when we leave this place behind, when we leave Mama behind. For the life of me I cannot see how Papa will be able to do it.
I asked him that two weeks ago when I brought him hot cornbread and cold spring water out to the stone wall marking our south field from Mr. Tilden’s. Papa saw me and waved. Then he finished cultivating the row, and guided Clem on over.
Clem, our old mule, stood off by the thinnest excuse for a tree the farm has, a whip of alder barely eight feet tall, where there was good tree shade not but a few steps away along the wall. As Papa says, Clem never was much for thinking things through. As he approached, one of that mule’s long ears flicked, waggling at a pesky bluebottle. I was about to ask Papa if there would be bluebottles out in Oregon, but he looked tired, too tired and sweaty to answer fool questions from me.
Papa wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, then slowly, like he was a hundred years old, he lowered himself to a patch of grass on the shady side of the wall. He sighed, his eyes closed as if he was napping.
I swear I wasn’t going to ask him a thing, only sit beside him while he chewed the cornbread—Mama’s recipe. It made me feel so proud that he liked my cooking, even said it was getting close to Mama’s. Now that was a compliment I could take all day long.
Then Papa cleared his throat and looked at me. “Janette, it is too late, I know, but I want to tell you I am sorry for putting you through what we are about to do. The trip west and all.”
This caught me by surprise. I could not bear Papa apologizing to me. I don’t recall hearing him apologize to anyone, ever. I started to say something but he held up a big, knuckled hand between us, as if to say, “Whoa now.”
There were the dark nubs of his calluses, that bandolier of a white scar running across his palm, the visible trace of a bad cut he’d gotten from a fouled plow line years before. I held my peace, wondering what I’d said to make him say such a thing. I felt about ready to crack in a thousand pieces and scatter in a stiff Missouri breeze.
“I have talked for a long time about moving westward, but never really asked your opinion of the trip, nor of your brothers.”
He smiled and the white lines by his eyes, what he called his “squintin’ wrinkles,” disappeared for a moment. Even with the wrinkles, he looked younger when he smiled. Maybe everybody looks younger when they smile.
“So tell me, girl.”
He crossed his long legs. “What is your opinion of the venture?” He popped cornbread into his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.
All I could think of to say was that I doubted the boys wanted anything more than to travel west to Oregon. I unwrapped the tea towel I’d swaddled around the cornbread. It was still warm and moist under my hand. Even on a sticky day, warm cornbread is a welcome thing, one of those little mysteries of life, as Mama used to call them.
Papa accepted another square, held it in one of his knobby hands in his lap. He looked at me with his blue-gray eyes. “That isn’t exactly what I asked, now is it?” I could tell he was serious because he kept that sly smile tamped down.
I looked at my bare feet, all grimy around the edges, dusted on top like they’d been powder-puffed. They were dirty enough that they didn’t much look like they belonged on my body. “No sir.”
Then I gave him that hard stare right back. “Won’t it be about impossible for you to leave this place . . . and Mama . . . behind?” I regretted saying it near as soon as it jumped out of my mouth. I am prone to saying a thing that’s bothering me, then worry about it too late. But that is the way I am and I cannot do a thing about it.
Papa sat quiet, then sort of leaked out a sigh. His eyes looked tired. “Your mama and me, we built this place with nothing much more than our hands, a few tools—a spade, whipsaw, and my double-bit axe. And one old horse, Clem’s mama.”
He cut his eyes to the sad-looking affair that was Clem, baking in the sun, the row cultivator not moving an inch.
“Then you children come along and put your own shoulders to the wheel, and that right there is what makes a good farm. It’s family.”
He had changed the course of his answer, which was fine by me. He bit the cornbread, chewed longer than he needed, nodding in time with his chewing. In a low, quiet voice, he said, “I will regret not being able to visit with her in the family plot.”
He looked up at me again. “But she’s not there, you see? I won’t really be leaving her behind, because she’ll be where she’s always been, since that first day I met her at your grandfather’s smithy shop when I was fifteen and she was thirteen.”
He closed his eyes and rapped his thumb against his sweat-dried shirt, the one that used to be blue. “She’s been right here in my heart since that day and she will never budge from there. She will make the trip with us.”
We sat like that a while longer, then as if told to, we both smacked our hands on our knees to stand. And that set us to laughing. We are so much alike, even more so than the boys are to him. At least that’s what I like to think. I know it’s childish, but I cannot help it. It’s my way and that is that.
I shook the tea towel of crumbs and hefted the water jug. Before I turned to walk back to the house, I asked him the real question I’d wanted to ask for a long time. “Why is it we’re going west, Papa?”
“Why? Seems to me we’ve talked that one to death, Janette girl.”
“We’ve talked around it some, that’s true.”
He nodded, got that crinkly look around his eyes again. “It’s what your mama called my wanderlust.”
“What’s that?” I asked it even though I had a good idea of what it was.
“Oh . . .”
He stretched wide and I heard his shoulders and back pop and crack. “I have an incurable desire to always know what’s over the next hill, and around the next bend in the road.”
He smiled and looked at me. “I expect it will be the death of me one day.”
“Don’t say that, Papa.”
“Oh, I’m only funnin’ you, girl. Now you best get back to the house. Do me a favor and make sure those boys are still working on those fence posts. You have my permission to give them what for if they are lazing on their backsides—like me!”
I had to laugh at that, as Papa is the least lazy person you will ever find.
Despite what he told me, I cannot help but think that come tomorrow, wanderlust or no, leaving this place will be a whole lot harder for Papa than it will be for me or the boys.