Four days into our trip and I can see that keeping this journal will be more of an effort than I imagined. Not that I am one to shy from effort, mind you. Who else would keep house for these three? That in itself is ordeal enough.
I do not wish to slip into the ease that I expect jotting a list of the day’s undertakings can be. That would be nothing but tedious for me to write and for someone someday to read. Which makes me wonder why keep a journal at all? I expect it is to remind myself of the journey one day when I am an old wrinkled crone with my grandbabies about me. If not for that reason, I ask again, why keep a diary?
Yes, every day I do most of the same things “on the trail,” as Papa insists on calling this adventure, as I did at home. I cook, I mend torn shirts and trousers, I gather firewood, then chop it for the fire (Thomas is not dependable). I clean and clean again everything we have brought with us. There is that much dust. I haul water when Thomas forgets, or more likely plain shirks the tasks that Papa has set out for him. I also tend the few chickens we brought with us, and I milk our Jersey cow, Floss.
Sadly, she has begun to show sign of strain, even this early in our travels. I think her old udder, swinging low as it is and slapping against her legs, must be a mighty sore thing by the time we stop each night. She walked plenty in the pasture at home, but at her own poke-along pace. She was not forced to walk all day, every day, even if we are not moving nearly as fast as I expected we would.
Papa says he is considering selling Floss at the next prosperous-looking farm we come upon. He says he does not want to have to resort to the inevitable. What that is he would not say, despite Thomas’s wheedling, but I think it does not need explaining. And I think it is kind of Papa to think of Floss’s comfort, even though he will miss fresh milk and butter. I am the one who milks her and makes the butter, though I was pleased to find the thumping and jiggling of the trail nearly does the churning in the cream pail for me. I will miss old Floss most of all. Her quiet ways and big brown eyes are a comfort. I can write no more of her now, so sad does it make me.
Don’t let me sully these crisp new pages with talk of the shame of laundry day. The things I am forced to clean! Young men are, well, I was going to write that they are pigs. But every pig we’ve ever kept has always struck me as tidy about itself. They will do their personal business in the same spot, usually a corner, so as not to soil the rest of a pen. No, young men are not pigs, but what they are, I have found nothing quite so nasty to compare yet. Perhaps there will be some bizarre beast we’ll find on the trail that will remind me of them. On second thought, I hope not, as I don’t know how many more sloppy, lazy, messy, rude critters I can take.
This is as good a moment as any to talk of my family. Thomas, my youngest brother, is two years my junior, which makes him twelve. While I am the middle child of the three of us, William, at age sixteen, sometimes seems older than Papa. I do not claim to know why this is, but I can say that he has always been this way, even as a child. That doesn’t mean he’s the cleanest person you’ll find on a farm, but compared with Thomas, I will allow as how William is somewhat tidy.
But there is no one like Thomas. I admit I have not met a whole lot of people in my life, but with Thomas, you get an uneven mix of good and rascal, of laziness and kindness. And that mix changes with the sun. He is without doubt the most frustrating person I know. He still tugs my hair though he has been told too many times to count by Papa and me and even William not to do it. It is as if he cannot resist, as if some devil pokes him in the ear when he walks by me.
Why once, back home, he sneaked up on me while I had a pan of hot bread balanced in one hand and my apron balled in the other, trying to shut the oven door. I spun on him, and smacked him hard on the cheek. His eyes went wide and I remember feeling awful about it, and thinking I had slapped a baby, so innocent did he seem. Five seconds later he was giggling as he ran out the front door. I reckoned I should have whacked him harder.
I am not certain I will do justice to this journal, untouched by my mother, something an aunt from Boston, Miss Minnie, I believe it was, had mailed to her years ago. I recall Papa saying it arrived a month after Mama’s birthday, but judging from the inscription it was intended as a birthday gift. Papa said Mama was puzzled by it at first, as the aunt had rarely shown an interest in her during her entire life to that point.
But once she got a leg over that confusion and shock, Mama laughed at the gift. Especially, said Papa, considering the old woman had spent years disapproving of Mama’s side of the family and their choices to move away from Boston to New York. Imagine what the old bird would think of us taking the trail to Oregon!
Papa and I had a laugh about that when he gave me the journal. He said Mama had never used it, but he had seen her a time or two with it open before her on the worktable. It would have been of an afternoon when her kitchen chores were in hand, at least for a time. There is never really free time in a kitchen, as something is always needing to be done and you cannot depend on a boy to do a lick of it, asked or no.
Papa said Mama could never bring herself to write in it. She told him it was so pretty and full of possibility that she didn’t dare set pen to it for fear that anything she might put in there would sully the beauty of the blank page before her. That was just like her.
He’d laughed at that, but not to her face. He never laughed at Mama. Then he gave me the journal. Said I was to do with it as I saw fit, but that he was certain Mama would want me to have it.
He has told me many times that I am a whole lot like Mama. I will take that as a compliment, though I will also be quick to say, at least here in these pages, that I am a whole lot like Papa, too. And it’s that part of me that couldn’t wait to commence filling these pages with my words, good, bad, or otherwise.
This journal will be what I make of it. No better, no worse. I am writing small because I have been told I can be windy when I get on a roll. I expect there will be long stretches on the trail when there won’t be anyone but Papa and my mule-headed brother, Thomas, to talk with. William doesn’t count because he rarely opens his mouth except to eat.
It will be such times I will want to talk to my journal, and in that way I reckon I will be talking to Mama, too. And since I expect I will be the only person to ever read this, I might as well fill it chock-full with everything I can think of saying. And then some.
Now the firelight is low, Papa is dozing sitting up, and the boys have gone to sleep. Papa is being polite and waiting up for me to finish off whatever it is I am doing in this journal. So with that I say good night.