8

Choices

“John?”

“Hello, dear Tabitha.” The tallish man tipped his bowler hat, clasped his age-spotted hands over his ivory-knobbed cane. “And you must be Virgilia. I’m your uncle John. No, your great-uncle, your grandfather’s brother.”

They’d just gotten off of the stage in St. Charles, returning from Manthano’s. John could have tipped Tabby over with one of Beatrice’s tail feathers, she was so discombobulated to find him standing there.

He turned to Tabby. “You look tidy and fit and, may I add, as beautiful as ever.”

No one had called her beautiful in twenty-eight years. She knew it wasn’t true, but the compliment washed over her like warm bathwater anyway.

“Tidy and fit? Well, my children don’t see that. They see me as old and lame. What are you doing here?” She had not seen John for maybe . . . fifteen years. He’d visited once after she’d dragged her boys kicking and screaming from the sea John loved. She hadn’t been all that happy to see him then, still holding him accountable for his stories luring her sons like Odysseus’s sirens to the sea.

What was he, twelve years older than she was? Yes, she was born in 1780 and he was born in . . . 1768, making him seventy-seven—soon to be seventy-eight. If she remembered, his birthday was close to All Saints’ Day. Despite his age, John cut a fine swath in the fall scene. Snow-white hair, a black suit with green tapestry vest, and a fine round-topped hat. When he smiled, his coal-black eyes smiled too. Tabby remembered that cane, the one he’d gotten in the Orient with an ivory handle. After his ship had wrecked and he’d been rescued by the French. She wasn’t sure he needed it, but it added to his finished fashion.

“Old and lame? Nonsense. Children don’t always see things as we elders do.” He pointed his cane toward Virgilia and winked.

“You’re an elder now,” Tabby said.

His black eyes sparkled. “We must claim any advantage we can, Tabby. It is good to see you.” He brushed his lips over the top of her gloved hands he’d lifted, then grinned down at her and held her gaze. He had Clark’s eyes and even his deep voice, but he was more flamboyant than her husband had ever been, liked finer things, too, while Clark had eschewed pomp.

The clerk lifted their trunk onto the wagon that John had apparently driven. The horses stomped and swished at flies.

“What are you doing here? Have you been commissioned by my son to look after me while they desert me and head west?”

“It would be my pleasure to take care of you.” He said it with a timbre that brought throat-clearing to Tabby.

“You must be between ships.”

“I am. But I may be ready to start a new phase of my life—shipless but seeking a new mate, perhaps.” He smiled as he said this and she could smell his cologne. The same kind Clark had worn. Did he always share that choice? What is happening here?

Beatrice clucked in the cage as Virgilia placed it on the wagon bed. “Gramo, Uncle . . .”

“Oh, yes, let’s get us home and we can talk then,” Tabby said. “So many stories you have to tell of your exploits, I’m sure.” She pulled away from his fingers, gripped her walking stick with both hands.

John helped Tabby up, then Virgilia. “How did you find Manthano then?”

“Busy packing for Oregon. They’re all going, John. Unless Virgil stays?”

John shook his head. “Arranging going on at the Pringles as well. That’s where I’m abiding, by the way. It wouldn’t be respectable to house with a single, attractive widow woman such as you.”

“You’re family, John. Goodness. And do my children have you remaining with me while they head off to Oregon? You haven’t really said.”

He leaned toward her. “I did in fact receive a letter some weeks back suggesting such a thing. But I thought I might offer an alternative. Maybe it’s time we considered making that family designation more formal.”

Tabby’s mouth went dry. She forced a laugh. “You always were a character, Brother Brown. Let’s not distress the young mind of Virgilia here with such talk. She’s managing enough change.” She patted Virgilia’s knee. She placed her walking stick between them on the seat. As good a barrier as she could imagine until she could make sense of this unexpected arrival.

On the ride home, Virgilia chattered with John, giving Tabby time to think about this man on the other side of her walking stick. The breeze picked up the ties from her cap and they tickled her neck. She hadn’t had such a compliment about her person for years. Beautiful? At her age? With her crooked body and wrinkled face? There’d been a few suitors after Clark died, but most faded away with three children to tend and a strong-willed woman directing them and any potential stepparent. It made her miss Clark more. He’d known her faults and foibles and loved her anyway. Did John see her faults? She’d known him almost as long as she’d known Clark. But he was so different than her husband. Still, given her years and miles? And his?

Once at her home, John helped her into her cabin, dragged the trunk in with Virgilia’s pushing, then tipped his hat. He held her hand softly once more.

“Think about it, Tabby. We could start a whole new life together here. What an adventure.”

She was thinking with more than a little trepidation.

Virgilia prattled on about her visit until her little sisters rolled their eyes and her brothers gestured as though they sewed threads through their lips. “I know you want me to be quiet, but it’s going to be exciting. And now that Uncle John is staying behind with Gramo, I won’t worry about her. I can get excited about the journey.”

“Get excited with a little less noise,” Albro told her.

“Doesn’t bother me.” Clark made a long reach with his fork to pick up the last sausage on the platter. “She can talk all she wants about Oregon, but it won’t be what you think it will be. It never is. You set a goal, but the lessons, well, they happen while you’re on the trail. Might even be the whole point of a journey, what happens along the way.” He chewed and looked at her, used his fork to point then. “You have a tendency to have short-lived excitement, Sister. As soon as you hit a little barrier, you sink like a rock in the pond.”

“I do not!”

“You do. This trip will require staying power, won’t it, Papa.”

“It will.”

Virgilia pouted. Yes, she had once agreed to work at a neighbor’s when the woman of the house took ill, and she’d only lasted three days. The children were demanding, the husband of no help, and they expected her to cook, clean, and tend the ill woman. Three days was all she could take. “You’re very philosophical. Thank you, dear brother. But I am truthfully looking forward to all the new people I’ll meet, viewing new landscapes, baking cakes with different flour. And I won’t have the daily drudgery. I mean daily chores. Sorry, Mama, I didn’t mean to complain.”

But Virgilia did see the daily work as drudgery, and the prospect of having to find new ways to do things living out of a wagon intrigued her, if it didn’t her mother. They’d been incorporating new activities to get ready. Drying food, making tons and tons of bacon, preparing pemmican as Orus said to do it. Knitting extra socks, sewing wool dresses and wrappers, two for each girl, and new duck pants for the men or maybe pantaloons for summer months of travel. Candles. Candles and more candles and lanterns. All the excitement was perfect for Virgilia. Added to that was the hope that Judson Morrow would be hired to help manage one of the ox teams along with her brothers. That would be the perfect ending to a dream even before her journey began.

She would think, though, about what Clark had said. She might need to be cautious about hoping for too much. Still, she resented his assertion that she lacked the ability to continue to persevere in the face of trouble. Her gramo was her model. If she could endure through hard times and face the pain of being left behind, she, Virgilia, could surely face whatever life had to offer her ahead.

“It isn’t decided yet,” Pherne told them all then. Heads turned with shocked looks on her brothers’ faces. “I may stay behind and insist that your father return to get me and the girls after he’s built us a home and we’ll have a proper place to live.”

The general chorus of complaints came from the boys as much as the girls. After all, they’d have to do their own cooking and washing if the boys went on without their mother and the girls.

“Well,” Virgilia told them, “it seems there might be a fly in your butter, boys. How will you adapt?”

Their voices rose toward their father to insist and plead with their mother. Virgilia was being smart, she knew, while her heart pounded at the possibility that her father and the boys might leave them behind.

Tabby served John her special pudding of plums with fresh cream slurried with sugar. He had a sweet tooth, had ever since he’d stopped consuming spirits. It had only been a few days since their return from Manthano’s, and he’d come by each morning to tell stories and offer to chop wood or pound a loose nail to tighten the porch steps. She’d hardly had a chance to write in her memoir. He was good company though. She laughed more than she had since before Clark’s death, and the idea of being left behind had eased into another possibility. Still, her mind made plans.

“I have a proposition for you, John.”

“Good. What shall it be? A willingness to take me in at last? To see what the Lord might have in mind for these old Browns while the young ones plod west?”

“Not exactly. What would you think about our teaming up—”

“My thoughts exactly.” He clapped his hands. “Wonderful, Tabby. Wonderful!” He stood and put his arms out as though opening his heart. “There is nothing more that I want at this point in my life than to team up and take care of you.”

“Yes. Well. No, not exactly . . . that.” She gripped her walking stick, held up her palm to stop him from moving toward her. “Eat your pudding and let me finish.” The entire countenance of his face dropped. She meant to cheer him, not discourage. “What would you think about our teaming up with our own wagon and going west with the ‘young ones,’ as you call them.” There, she’d said it. Out loud, it sounded a little hollow, but in her prayers it made perfect sense.

“I don’t think Orus will allow it. Not likely Virgil either.” He took another bite.

“But it doesn’t matter what they think. We can do this on our own. We could use the journey to get our feet wet, so to speak. Figure out how we are together.” She felt her face grow hot and she fiddled with the strings on her cap. She had to be firm. Strong. “We aren’t past our prime yet, John.”

He grunted.

“Maybe we are, a little. But we’re still here so there must be a purpose for our lives. I’ve prayed about this and I can’t see that staying behind without family is what God intends.”

“Orus says it’s a dangerous journey. That’s why he doesn’t want you to go, why he summoned me.”

“But why did you come? Wasn’t it for the possibilities?”

“I suppose.” He brushed crumbs from his green tapestry vest.

“Then let’s set up a united front. I’ll sell what wares I have and buy a wagon. Could you furnish it?”

“Indeed. I have plenty of resources in that regard. I could even make the purchase if that would help. If we decide to do this.” He pointed with his spoon.

“I’ll pay my fair share. But I see no reason why we can’t travel with our family, make the trek, and show them what we’re capable of. If Manthano’s wife can make it with a new baby—and probably she’ll be pregnant with the next by the time we leave—then surely we are not too old to begin a new adventure.”

“And you’d consider the . . . other? A marriage, perhaps?”

Tabby had known he would ask that and she didn’t want to mislead him. “I will prayerfully consider it, John. And regardless of the prayer’s answer I am humbled that after all these years and with all your world travels that you would find me . . . approachable in a . . .”

“Romantic form?”

“Yes. That’s not a road I ever imagined I’d be taking at my age. But then I never imagined I’d be heading to Oregon either.”

He rose, bowed as though to royalty. “My brother loved the delight, the enthusiasm you brought into his life, and now I see that too.” Then, “To Oregon it is.” He lifted his ivory-handled cane and tapped it against her walking stick, striking the deal that would change both their lives forever.