17
Voices
I must speak of a mysterious “power.” Sometimes we are placed where we are because we have listened to another voice. This happened while Mary visited, and I’m grateful I had a reasoned source to explore with me how what happened could have occurred. We were leaving Georgetown. We’d been ready to board, five adults and four children. An ill man and his small son sat atop the stage in the cooler air at their request and having paid the extra price. The rest of us piled inside. And then this amazing thing happened. It’s hard for me to write about it and yet I must.
August 14, 1880
The sardine ride,” Mary quipped as we tried to settle our bustles and bags into the stage. A nanny had the four children under control—I hoped. Their mother looked pale.
Then as the driver was about to lift the reins, a man reading the paper by the Barton House stood up, shouted for the stage to halt, said that he had to be on it. “I’ll get my coat and bag. Five minutes most.” He was a brawny sort and he rushed about, while groaning occurred from the pale-faced mother and the man atop telling the stage driver to head out. Mary and I were in no hurry, but I could see where a mother with four children might want to reach her destination as quickly as possible.
For some reason, even though the jehu already held the ribbons and whip ready to flick above the lead team’s ears (a horse was never whipped), he pulled up, allowing the brawny man to join us. The straggler huffed and puffed as we resettled ourselves inside, squeezed even more into that sardine state.
A child coughed as we started out. The nanny picked up another to hold on her lap to give a bit more room to the grown-ups, and then the newest passenger introduced himself as George Washington Giggy. A rancher, he was headed to Georgetown to ride a horse there for a man, but here he was, going the opposite direction, seventy miles. And he told us of this strange power that had insisted he get on our very stage.
Call it intuition. Men say that about women’s ways. But this man had listened to something and he was willing to see where following that inner voice would take him. He looked embarrassed as he told us of his experience, but I find myself with that same expression when trying to make sense of mystical moments—and that’s how I described it.
We rattled along easy enough, feeling the jerks of a six-horse team that from the uneven stride told me they had not moved as a six-hitch team for long. Or the jehu was new to them. More surging and a sense that the horses took all his effort to hold back. I didn’t say anything to Mary about my observations, but when you ride a stage as much as I did, you begin to recognize the skill of the driver, the inexperience of the team, the condition of the Concord. As we rounded a third curve with more speed than required, three of the four children threw up. A stage like that could remind one of sea travel, and apparently it did to these children. I had to fight back joining them, with the smell now permeating the interior. We helped the nanny clean up, but they kept up their discomfort, moaning.
At a mail stop, we had a brief respite, though Mary and I stayed in the stage. The nanny got out with the four children to give them a little fresh air, and the jehu wrapped his ribbons around the brake while he loaded and unloaded mail bags. No one at the mail post stood to calm the horses, who jerked forward and back, restless as a woman’s legs after a long ride astride.
And then, as though as one, the horses lurched forward, the brake slipped off and in seconds they surged at full speed. Without a driver. The sick man atop couldn’t gain the reins and his boy attempted to jump off, then slipped and fell between the wheels. I knew we’d run over him. Mary couldn’t see what made me gasp.
Mr. Giggy sat across from me, jostled by the thrust, his hands in prayer, his face contorted. Then his countenance brightened. “If I can get up to get the lines, they’re still wrapped around the brake, I can halt—” His words were shoved back and forth as the stage rocked. I knew we’d soon approach a length of corduroy road which, if we hit it crooked, would flip the stage and drag us to our deaths.
Then before I could even complete my own prayer, Mr. Giggy wrangled his large self out through the window and atop the stage to the front boot, where he grabbed the lines, shouting, “I have them!” That did not stop the rolling, rattling stage, however, as no man can hold back six runaway horses. But we could pray he could guide them enough that they would hit the corduroy directly and, in time, tire themselves out and slow themselves down.
As the stage roiled like a ship on a dark sea, I believed in that moment that we were going to die.
There was no panic in me. I didn’t have my life flash before my eyes. A sense of calm flooded my spirit, and I felt badly for Mary and for Robert, as I knew he’d blame himself for sending me on, for not accompanying us. There was no white light as I had heard people speak of when they thought they were about to die. It was an . . . acceptance, that God was with us and we might live or we might die, but in the end, it would be alright. I was very reassured by that calm.
“No, no!” Mary’s words took me from my peace. She grabbed at the mother, who clutched at the door handle, trying to open it.
She screamed, “I must return to my children!”
“They’re fine. If you jump out, you’ll die.” Mary took her hands.
I looked into her terrified eyes. “He’s gotten the reins. The horses will tire.” I used my most steady voice. But she wasn’t all there, her fear wiping all reason from her. I lunged to help my sister then, to hold the woman in as we bounced around like stones in a swirled bucket. The woman sobbed and fought us through her crying.
I felt, then heard us hit the corduroy road, breathed gratitude that we’d struck it square. We rattled on a mile or more and once off of it, our savior Mr. Giggy turned the team into a fence where the sweating horses stopped, hung their heads, breathed hard and snorted.
“I’ll bring them about,” he called down to us. “We’ll head back. They’re tired now. It’ll be alright, ladies, gentleman.” He spoke to the ill man who moaned about his son.
Not long after turning back, we met the driver fast-walking toward us and he took over from Mr. Giggy. I would have liked our angel to have remained atop, as he was being thanked profusely. He walked back to the mail stop where Mr. Giggy opined, “I guess I know now why I was supposed to take this stage.”
Not a one of us disputed his claim.
It was a day to celebrate Providence’s intervention, the boy who had fallen was not killed. He was badly hurt, though. His ill father stayed with him at the postal stop where the children were also reunited with their mother. Much hugging and kissing and crying, though the nanny had kept close tabs on them. That family stayed and would return to Denver in the morning.
Mary and I and new passengers from the postal stop all traveled on to the Middle Park Hotel at Sulphur Springs. Getting out, I wobbled to the front of the team, patted the neck of one lead animal. “Quite a day you’ve had.” The big animal lifted its head and jangled the bridle. I saw blood at his mouth where he’d held the bit. “You’ll tend these horses well tonight, won’t you?” The jehu nodded, looked sheepish, it seemed to me. He knew of his part in this catastrophe. That boy’s broken bones would take some time to heal.
Mary and I sat at the edge of one of the hot springs where a cooler stream rushed through—there were more than twenty springs—with fifty cabins set around. “What do you think of all that happened today?” Mary asked. All I could see of her was her head that held a bathing cap, the ruffles limp in the steamy water. Lit candles with a lavender scent gave more an illusion of light than being able to see. She moved closer to the edge where it wasn’t as hot and could be refreshing. “The role of Providence in our rescue,” Mary continued. “There’s no denying that Mr. Giggy was where he was meant to be.”
“I suppose one of us might have wrangled ourselves through that window and crawled up to the boot, but we’d have little knowledge of how to operate that set of reins once we got there.” I shivered. “And the horses would feel that. They’d know they had an amateur at their helm. Mr. Giggy is a horseman. He had the size and bulk and had obviously managed smaller teams. He was the right one.”
“And he listened. I think that’s the hardest part of this life journey.” Mary’s body sat out farther still, seeking the cooler edges. The water steamed off her legs. “Knowing how to listen to all the different voices that talk to us.”
“Mary, are you hearing voices?” I teased.
“I’m not jesting. We all hear voices inside. Things Mama told us when we were little that remind us of some action to take in the present. Husbands tell us things we let stew inside our heads and hearts, even when they aren’t present. It’s not always for the best.”
I thought of Robert’s words about my writing under my own name or how I sometimes didn’t do what I thought best because I knew Robert would have done it another way. I’d do it his way instead of my own way, so I didn’t have to defend if questioned.
“It’s so hard to know if the voice we’re hearing is Providence. Or some tempting devil.” Mary got out of the water and dabbed a towel to her face.
“If we’re familiar with the voice, that would help,” I posed.
She brushed beads of sweat from her face. “That means time in silence, doesn’t it? A mother labors to find such time. I envy you those long walks you write about.”
“Music is where I hear the voice of God,” I said. “Not so much when I’m singing as when I’m preparing to sing, in those moments of silence before the first notes. I sometimes think silence is the first note. Then I get lost inside the music.”
“I’ll tell you a secret. When I’m writing, that’s how I feel. It’s like I’m there allowing another voice to speak.”
“Even when it’s about practical things like your piece on how to make a perfect cherry pie? It had lots of humor in it. I loved that.”
“Even then. I imagine I’m making someone’s day brighter, offering them a small respite. It’s nothing like a book, of course, I know that. But I think everyday moments can be divine. Mr. Giggy’s story is a divine revelation that there is still mystery in the world, unexplained phenomena. Miracles.”
“People don’t call much miraculous anymore. We’ve gotten cynical. But I have no trouble calling it that. All the little things, too, like our working together to keep that mother from jumping out. And bigger ones, the boy not dying. At least I hope he won’t die. And most of all, Mr. Giggy being willing to go in a totally opposite direction from what he’d planned for today. How many people are willing to look foolish?”
“You did, when you married Robert.”
I thought about that. “I guess I did.” I laughed.
“All those other voices telling you it was crazy to go off with him and plan to travel the West by stage and train and horseback, without a home to come back to. It’s quite a different path for a lady to take. Mama says that often.”
“I’m sure she does. But has it benefited the life of anyone? Or was it just a selfish wish on my part, to indulge in my own dreams and adventures?”
“You were here today to keep a woman from jumping to her death. You nursed Robert and what was his name?”
“Mr. Gleed.”
“Both men were brought back to health. You’ve given Robert sound advice. And I suspect there have been other moments where you were present to offer a kind word when someone needed it.”
All those stalwart women at the stage stops, the ones I’d paid a compliment to. Could such a little thing really be divine-inspired?
I may not manage a runaway team but working with my sister, I did listen to common sense and help a woman face terror.
I got out of the pool. “When we were racing along today, I had the most tranquil moment. I wasn’t afraid. I accepted whatever would happen. I’m reassured that when my time comes, I won’t be terrified because I know I’m not alone.”
“Tranquility. Who knew one could find it in the wildest of moments.” She sighed, wrapped the towel around her shoulders. “I could stay here for the rest of my life.”
“Willie and Christina would come find you. Two months to let you go is a very long time.” I never loved her more than at that moment. “I’m so grateful that you’re here.”
“Something told me it was time to see my sister. I listened.”