2
Lucinda lifted her eyes from her work to greet Jennie. “There you are. I wondered what happened to you two.”
“We took a little hike.” Jennie hurried past, up the stairs, and put the quilt back into the trunk, laid the Schyrle onto it, then rushed back down.
“Nellie cried looking for you.” The child sucked a thumb as she stood beside her mother. “Mary wondered too.”
I should have taken the girls with us. “I’m sorry. We walked by the creek. This fox came by. Have I told you about that?” She lifted her apron from the kitchen hook, dropped it over her head, then wrapped the strings around her still-tender middle. Tender from the birth—and death—of her baby.
Lucinda wiped her forehead of the dampness worked up while she kneaded the bread dough before her. A second pang of guilt rose up: Jennie shouldn’t have been off playing with her son while Lucinda worked so hard. But they all labored.
Charles and Joseph Sloan had worked to build the two-story clapboard house they lived in. Though it had three bedrooms, it was nonetheless crowded with the Sloans, Picketts, and new boarders. The three single men shared one room and the two sisters and their families found scant privacy in the other two bedrooms. At times it felt like they were still on the wagon train that brought them from Illinois to Oregon, exposing them to new people finding their places in a moving menagerie of hope elbowed by discomfort. Jennie was only ten when she traveled the Oregon Trail with the “Missionary Train,” but she remembered the strangeness of so many new people and the habit her parents had of inviting others to their fires. Her sister collected strays too, and more than once Jennie wondered if she wasn’t one of them, arriving at Lucinda’s hearth when she was fifteen, perhaps having worn her own parents out.
The boarders left each morning, securing work as bricklayers, fashioning harnesses, or helping widows plant their beans and peas. They brought home happy stories from their labor. Joseph and Charles brought their work home too, but their talk didn’t contribute to an enlightened atmosphere. Joseph was the superintendent of the Oregon State Prison, containing those convicted or feebleminded; and Charles was his assistant. The county spent twice the money on dealing with the legal system as on building roads, a disparity Charles and Joseph thought appropriate until a horse became mired in muck while taking a prisoner from court to jail. They didn’t share Jennie’s view—that everything was interconnected, roads and criminals two threads to the weave of humanity.
Charles and Joseph spoke of control and punishment, sometimes making fun of the feebleminded, which made Jennie sad and, worse, guilty that she didn’t speak up to defend them. They never pondered about how people came to be the way they were, unable to think clearly or making choices that landed them in prison.
“You’re soft, Jennie,” Joseph pronounced once when she braved the confab at the table to bring up an alternative to the opinion that their prisoners were worthless men.
“Justice and mercy both are required of us,” Jennie said.
Charles snickered into his soup bowl.
Joseph pointed his fork, jabbing a bite of duck toward her. “You can’t heal everything, Jennie Pickett. Your oils might be good for children and docile women but not for those with hardened hearts.”
Charles kept his blue eyes to his bowl, not wanting to disagree with his boss. She supposed she was fortunate Charles didn’t say out loud what he growled about in their room: how his hard-earned money ought not be spent on oils and aromatics, lavender and licorice root. But they were her passion, healing not an effort to her but rather her greatest joy.
Jennie shook her head of the memory. She sighed, patted her apron that smelled of lavender soap she’d made. She continued telling Lucinda about the fox, reaching for the rolling pin. “This fox—I assume it’s the same one each time—trots along and takes sheep’s wool from the willows and, with a mouthful, jumps into the water.” Lucinda’s brow furrowed, so Jennie sped up her telling. “As he floats along, he releases tufts, but only after the bugs and whatnot from his fur have hopped onto the wool. They disappear and he’s free of them. It’s a cleansing ritual. Self-healing. Quite fascinating to witness.”
“You got close enough to see that?”
“My eyes are good. And I had my Schyrle.”
“I wasn’t questioning you.” Lucinda reached her hand across the table to touch Jennie’s as she pressed the rolling pin on the dough.
“I know that. Everything urges my . . . defensiveness, I’d guess I’d call it. Then I turn to weepy.” Her eyes watered, unbidden.
“Your wounds are still fresh.” Lucinda spoke with a mothering tone. “How sweet you got to see something like that fox. I suppose the sheep scrape against the willows?”
Jennie nodded. “Maybe Reverend Parrish’s Merino ewes are leaving wool behind. I wonder if I could pluck enough to spin some of that fine wool for a shawl.”
“And deprive your fox?” Lucinda laughed.
“And deprive my fox.” Jennie smiled, wiped her eyes with the edge of the apron. It smelled of sunshine too. Why the sight of the daffodils and fox brought such comfort she didn’t know. Perhaps a sign that she’d now start thinking of happier, healing things.
Jennie had named their baby Ariyah after her best friend. The word in Italian meant “musical” and in Greek it suggested “pure.” She liked the sound of the word, and its meaning even more, asking her friend to write it down so she could memorize the letters. Pure music. It was perfect for a child born without blemish and whom Jennie had sung songs to while the infant grew within.
Charles had crafted the coffin, suggested Jennie line it with silk. They buried her in November, the ground rarely freezing in the Willamette Valley, so she could be laid to rest in a steady drizzle. The child was rarely mentioned now—doing so upset Charles. But Ariyah was seldom far from Jennie’s mind.
After the death, Charles’s evenings took on the pattern of disappearing with Joseph, both returning late. He brushed aside Jennie’s need to speak of Baby Ariyah, creating a widening space between them.
The evening of the fox sighting, Jennie had intended to share that happy memory, but Charles was in one of his moods, offering one-word answers to questions about his day. She put Dougie to bed and didn’t mention the fox. She spoke her evening prayers, whispering Ariyah’s name.
“The baby didn’t require a name.” He spoke into the darkness as they lay side by side in their featherbed.
“Not name her?” This was a new complaint. His grieving took a twisted turn. “God gave names to everything he made. We always name the things we love. The people we love.”
She could feel Charles massage his neck in the darkness, but earlier he’d denied he had a headache when Jennie asked if he might like a rub of periwinkle to his temples.
“We have a son named Douglas,” he said. “That’s what matters now. Your mourning brings gloom to the entire household. I don’t look forward to coming home to such. So stop it.” He rolled to his side, pulling the cover over his shoulder, leaving her shivering in the March night.
He’d been so kind, so tender in their courting. Flowers pleased her, especially daffodils, and he often picked them growing wild. His look into her eyes had sent trills of passion through her in those days before his fall.
“Perhaps it’s all the people under one roof that brings our trouble. And the harsh discussions of prisoners that keep joy from the atmosphere.” She hesitated then. “Or the scent of liquor that follows Sloan home.” She knew she had just raised the tension, but then plunged into the abyss of lingering loss. “She might have lived if you’d gone straight for the doctor and returned before—”
A quick jerk, his shoulder whacked against her face. “Enough or I’ll give you something to whine about!” He had never struck her, though he had said things that hurt as much.
Does he not know he’s split my lip?
Threatening now, hissing. Spittle hit her face. “You put two and two together to make it my fault? You can’t remember the sequence to starching my shirts without a disaster but wrap blame around a stick to make it a cudgel to beat me with?” She couldn’t see his face. He gripped her shoulders. She curled into herself. “You’re so swift to find fault with me when it was your body that defiled the child.”
His words sliced. She was too stunned to speak.
“I don’t want to hear another word about ‘A-rye-ahhhh.’ Sounds like what you say to a doctor with a tongue depressor stuck in your throat.”
What does a tongue depressor have to do with our deceased child? Was it the shock of his threatening her or one of those times when she didn’t understand his sarcasm?
She rolled out of bed as he turned away. A shaking hand lit the candle, carried it down the steps to the kitchen shelf where she kept her herbs and oils. Charles called them snake oils, no better than those peddled by the Hebrews in their carts. But Jennie put them to good use and sometimes earned their cost back. She opened the vial of eucalyptus and inhaled, hoping it would calm her pounding heart.
At least the herbs and oils gave a way to pay Lucinda back for all she did for Jennie and her family. She often rubbed peppermint oil onto Lucinda’s sore muscles, treated her nieces’ cuts.
She sat at the table, waiting for dawn, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, praying for guidance. Her lip grew fat as she bit against it.
How had she come to marry a man so different from her father or brothers? Oh, Charles was interested in business and public life, had been a petitioner to create a new county from Washington County where her parents lived, and he urged improvement on the Tualatin River to advance commerce and transportation. Her family was all concerned with civic duty and responsibility to others, and she’d seen that in Charles and welcomed it. Her brother David Lichtenthaler—DW—was the first Republican elected as county clerk in Marion County and two years previous had been appointed county judge for the new Union County in the far east of the state. Jennie was young, just fifteen when they’d met, with dreams she never shared with Charles, dreams that couldn’t be now.
She was susceptible to the wiles of an older man able to take care of her, she supposed, one with a honeyed tongue, quoting poetry and prose and lines from sermons, who dwelled on her “beauty” and didn’t take note of her flaws. Perhaps her family saw him as one who would look after her, given her deficiencies so important to a well-read family. Reading was a challenge to Jennie’s brain. No one seemed to know why.
Charles was well-read. Jennie was lovesick. Her parents didn’t object. On their wedding day her father did bless the marriage with Scripture and a prayer following Judge Wilcox’s pronouncement.
No, she had not misread Charles. Their union was a knot tied tight like that of rawhide, meant never to be broken. But that knot did need oiling, often, to keep it from fraying. That was what she was doing now, sitting alone in the kitchen, watching the sun come up, putting oil on her lip and creating a story of protection, of how she’d stepped on a rake and the handle had struck her in the face. It would explain the bruising on her cheek too. And who would question Jennie Pickett doing something so inept as letting a rake she’d failed to put away come back to haunt her. “Oh, that Jennie,” her siblings would say as they shook their heads, familiar with her faults.
Maybe that was a reason disciplining Dougie proved a strain: his oafish efforts at expression of frustration reminded her of her own challenging childhood.
Once, not long after Ariyah’s birth and death, her sister said something about Dougie being a blessed trial. She took it as a comment on her mothering.
“Maybe he misses Baby Ariyah too,” Jennie defended.
Lucinda scoffed. Their mother was there, visiting, her knitting needles clicking. She looked over at Lucinda.
“He does,” Jennie insisted. “He asked me one day what happened to the baby in my belly, what I’d done with it. I told him she’d gone to be with God. He asked me then if he was next.”
For all their goodness and experience with child-rearing and tending grandchildren, neither of them believed that small children noted the passing of another, had wonderings about life and death, even while they lacked the words to speak their thoughts. For so long, Jennie had lacked words to express herself. She still struggled. But one thing she knew: a death becomes the hub of a wheel and family members its spokes. They move around it for a very long time. It was Jennie’s dream to prevent the deaths, illnesses, and sufferings of others, especially for women and children, and when she couldn’t, to change that hub.