Guardian Page 5

  I roused Daniel, only a little groggy, because the pilot had said we’d be passing Wabasha as it got dark, and they’d certainly have some sort of display.

  While we waited I told him all about the Flammarion book, and he was pretty excited until I admitted that it was in French, not his favorite subject. He’d liked the language so little he’d switched to Latin. He did much better in it than his mother had.

  Indeed there were fireworks, and although they were some miles away, that in itself was a little exotic and charming. Instead of being in the middle of them, we were distant observers, the faint popping sounds seemingly random, unassociated with the bursts of sparks and stars.

  Of course the gentlemen had to unleash their revolvers and fire them into the air, in accompaniment. It’s a good thing we weren’t in any danger from savage Indians. Our gallant protectors would run out of ammunition and we’d all be scalped.

  I read until past midnight, sipping a little more sherry than I was accustomed to. I had a strange and compelling dream, strong and odd enough for me to mention it in the next day’s diary entry. More than fifty years later, I’m struck by the element of prophecy in it: I dreamed that an unearthly creature, whose shape was indistinct, took me to worlds that were dreams within a dream. I knew I was dreaming, but that dream partook of a strange reality, as did the dream within it.

  I had a headache the next day bad enough to keep me in bed until noon. I was grateful that there was no more gunplay; maybe the men who had been up all night doing it were in no better condition than me.

  Daniel slept late but otherwise seemed not to show any aftereffects from his excesses. He went out for breakfast and brought me back some salicylate of soda, which the cook was selling in penny packets. I drank it down with a pint of cool water, and my condition did improve. When I went up for a bowl of soup I was treated to the sight of Trempealeau Island, five hundred feet high and most beautiful.

  The fifth was Daniel’s birthday. I found him up on the hurricane deck, reading a week-old newspaper, and gave him his present: Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He devoured it in one long sitting, and for years it was his favorite book. I later read it, though, and wondered whether it might have been too horrific for a boy his age. If somebody had told me that in my later years I would be writing equally horrific, if less literary, tales, for a penny a word, I would have scoffed.

  For all that day and the next, I worked my way through the Flammarion book, making a list of words and phrases I couldn’t puzzle out, along with their page numbers. Greta and Valerie were glad to sit with me and try to translate—Greta especially, because the book aroused in her the same fascination it did in me.

  Many years later, I regretted not being able to talk with them frankly about their lives in California. Today I could; it’s hard to shock an old woman. They were apparently lighthearted and casual about it, and I might have learned things from them that would have made that aspect of marriage easier. My main concern at the time, though (other than the Flammarion book), was keeping Daniel away from them. He was a pretty lad, and had what I now admit were normal impulses for a fourteen-year-old. To me at the time, he was still a vulnerable child, and I his only protector—and the pain his father had caused both of us did nothing to liberalize my attitude toward carnality.

  New worlds.

  After I returned the book to them, I wrote down this: Flammarion makes it seem not just likely, but inevitable, that other worlds should be inhabitable. To deny that is almost impious, saying that God’s powers of creation are finite. The people on those worlds must be wondrous indeed, evolving to adapt to their harsh and bizarre conditions. (Darwin’s Origin of Species was published the year after I was born, and when I was in college it was part of the canon, though still fodder for righteously indignant sermons.)

  When we passed by Hannibal, the pilot entertained us after dinner with an hour’s reading from Twain’s book. He was a natural comedian, and did the voices of the querulous and gruff in a way that had us helpless with laughter.

  The next day, though, we had cause to wonder why they call this river the Mississippi rather than the Missouri. We reached the confluence of the two, and it was obvious that the rich muddy waters of the Missouri quite overwhelmed the northern “branch.” For many miles the two ran in parallel courses, until the clear Mississippi finally blended with its turbid sister.

  Then we came to the end of the line for Diamond Jo Steamers, St. Louis. It was strange to be on land again after so many days. Both of us found that if we tried to stand still, the ground would continue to rock under our feet, a disturbing sensation that lasted at least a whole day.

  We took a room at the Planter’s Hotel, and Daniel tagged along while I went off to shop for another working dress. I was able to leave him in a bookstore while I was being fitted.

  I’d found out that the Missouri Pacific Railroad had put on an early-morning train, without sleepers, to Kansas City, so we came down to the station at six thirty the next morning. There were a hundred or so people slumped around the waiting room, not all of us in sympathy with the Pullman strikers.

  The trip to Kansas City was uneventful. We backtracked a bit, going along the Missouri River all morning, and then went off into the featureless plains after Jefferson City. The porter gave us a deck of cards, and Daniel, with undisguised avidity, taught me how to play poker, which he had picked up on the steamboat while I was immersed in Flammarion. We played for toothpicks, and after a couple of hours he had almost all of them—and then I mastered the idea of bluffing, and won almost all of them back. What kind of mother would lie to her son over a couple of toothpicks?

  It did pass the time, but we were both tired and sore by the time we got to Kansas City at sundown. We could have continued down into Kansas (K.C. is in Missouri) but decided to rest up. We got a shabby but clean room at the Centropolis.

  I thought about suggesting to Daniel that we come to ground here. Kansas City was probably the last place we would see that would have anything like the amenities we were accustomed to. But the aim of our flight was to wind up at “the ends of the earth,” where Edward would never find us. And I harbored the hope that after we had hidden out for a few years, we might return to civilization, east or west.

  We rested for a day, strolling. We crossed the bridge over to Kansas City, Kansas. The smell of the stockyards and packing-houses could turn one into a vegetarian.

  I went into several pawnshops in both Missouri and Kansas, having my wedding ring appraised. One of the Missouri ones offered $250, fifty dollars more than anybody else, so I took it back there and sold it. I suppose it was worth twice as much, at least, but I was glad to be rid of it. The ruby necklace I had traded a tooth for brought another hundred.

  The next day, we boarded the morning train to Topeka, where we picked up the branch to Dodge City.

  Miles and miles of grain, and then desolate, untamed prairie from horizon to horizon. Daniel stared out the window for hours on end, ignoring the book in his lap. I let him be. He had probably expected something more interesting.

  A few years before, Dodge City had been the epitome of the wild and wooly west. The town literally started as a saloon. Fort Dodge had been in place since 1865, an outpost that protected pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail. In 1872, a Canadian named George Hoover showed up with a wagonload of whiskey, knowing that liquor was not allowed within five miles of the fort. He measured out five miles down the trail, set up a tent, and made a bar out of a board and two stacks of sod. That became the town.

  There’s a popular radio show now, Gunsmoke, that purports to be about Dodge City in the early days, but it’s far too wholesome. The town had two periods of prosperity. The first one was from 1872 to 1876, when the town was called Buffalo City, and was the West’s main shipping point for buffalo hides and meat. Millions of the animals were killed by men who essentially sat in one place and shot them like fish in a barrel, until they were exterminated.

 
; It was a very rough town then. Seventeen people were killed in shoot-outs the first year of its existence, most in the “no man’s land” south of the railroad tracks. North of the tracks, even then, it was illegal to carry a gun.

  Dodge might have died with the buffaloes if not for a legislative action that made it “Queen of the Cowtowns,” a dubious distinction. Texas longhorns used to be driven every year to railheads in Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita—but it turned out the Texas cows were killing the Kansas ones. They carried a tick to which they were immune, but which caused a killing fever in the local cattle.

  The Kansas legislature established a quarantine line that protected those three cities, and by default gifted Dodge with the annual visit of a quarter of a million tick-infested cattle. Along with the cows came cowboys, of course—and gunmen, card sharps, prostitutes, and whoever else might make a dollar off these bored and tired and reckless men.

  It only lasted ten years. In 1885, the quarantine was extended to include the whole state. Dodge had its own cattle by then, presumably immune to the tick disease—but the winter of ‘85/’86 was one long blizzard, which all but destroyed the industry.

  When our train pulled into town nine years later, Dodge was still a cowtown without many cows. (I called the Chamber of Commerce in 1951, and they reluctantly admitted that the bovine population was still under the 1885 level.) But there were people, and the people had children, and the children needed teachers.

  I had hoped to sit down with some frontier rustics and sweep them off their feet with my obvious education, and so be able to continue living under an assumed name and false background—but even in Dodge, that would not be possible. A schoolteacher had to establish her credentials. So I gave them my real name and they wired Wellesley for my bona fides.

  I suspected then that it was only a matter of time before Edward would follow that trace back to Dodge. As it turned out, he would be slow, and we would have more than four years of grace.

  Almost sixty years later, I wonder what was in my head. When they asked for my credentials, I should have demurred and put Daniel back on the train, and traveled on, perhaps to Mexico or Central America. Anywhere the law could reach us, a lawyer could as well. For all his faults, Edward was a good lawyer.

  And he was not a man to be bested by a woman.

  None of that was in my mind when the train pulled away from the depot in Dodge, leaving us alone, tired, dusty, and baking under the Kansas summer sun. There was no one in charge at the depot, just an empty telegraph room, but there was a sign offering rooms for rent up on Central Avenue, with a simple map. With no conveyances in sight, we hoisted our belted-together footlockers and headed up the hill.

  It was a rooming house run by a Mrs. Clifton, who was a strange and unpleasant woman, suspicious and querulous. I took two rooms for a month because they were cheap, nine dollars apiece, and we were too tired to go off searching for another place. We had been on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for more than twenty-four hours, including an interminable wait in Hays City, and of course there were no sleepers. I checked our beds for vermin and, finding nothing macroscopic, gratefully collapsed for all the afternoon and night.

  In the morning we had a wholesome breakfast of grease and eggs on hard bread, and set out to explore. Daniel wanted to see Boot Hill, where desperados slightly slow on the draw would wind up, but it wasn’t there anymore—in fact, if we’d come four years earlier, I might have wound up teaching over those old graves. The bodies had been relocated to Prairie Grove in 1878, and a schoolhouse was built on the lot. But it burned down in ‘90, and was still charred rubble when we sought it out.

  Daniel was not unprepared for the lack of excitement in Dodge; I’d told him about the sarcastic magazine article I’d read, describing how tame it was now. But still I think he was hoping against hope that some cowboy would come around the corner, all clinking spurs and creaking leather. It never happened. No cows, no cowboys, at least in town.

  What did happen was a game of stickball near the ruins of the Boot Hill school. They said they could use another player, so Daniel got to work off some energy while I sat on a bench and contemplated our limited future.

  There was no shade. Every tree in Dodge was one that had been brought from the East, transplanted and carefully nurtured. Few public areas had trees then—although an enterprising citizen had planted and cultivated an extensive vegetable garden along the railroad tracks, to demonstrate the land’s potential fertility to people who might be lunatic enough to try farming.

  I went back to Mrs. Clifton’s to take a bath, and when Daniel came in he used the water after me (fairly turning it to mud). When night fell we lit kerosene lamps. There were electric lamps on the street, but the house was not wired—Mrs. Clifton thought electricity was dangerous, and she was probably right, at that time and place. Wooden houses like hers were dry tinderboxes.

  The next day I went to the Third Ward School and found the principal, Leroy Roberts. He did have an opening for a college-educated teacher, to teach grades nine through twelve.

  It looked like a lot of work for seventy-five dollars per month. I would teach from nine till four, an hour off for lunch, with the day divided into thirty-four segments. It was mostly recitation and memorization. My lesson plan was a three-inch stack of paper in a worn leather portfolio, and I would start work in six weeks.

  I’d thought about getting a temporary job before school started, but it was obvious I wouldn’t have time. I had a basket full of books as well as the portfolio, and a keen sense of all I’d forgotten in the fifteen years since I’d left college. The prospect of declining Latin verbs again filled me with dread, and since childhood I had never been good with history, the memorization of names and dates. I had luck with the Latin, which was being taught by a specialist, but not with history, which of course was heavily weighted toward the history of Kansas and the West.

  Without my asking, Daniel volunteered to go out and find a job till school started, which filled me with pride. He knocked on doors for a day, and got a job at a newspaper, the Globe Live Stock Journal, cleaning up and sorting type for a dollar a day.

  I opened a bank account with the wedding-ring and necklace money, and stored the seventy-three golden eagles in a safe-deposit box, putting them out of my mind. I wanted to hold on to the hard money for insurance. That turned out to be a wise precaution.

  During those frantic six weeks we didn’t meet many people. The two other lodgers at Mrs. Clifton’s were stiff gentlemen who spoke in monosyllables at breakfast and supper, I think embarrassed by the presence of a woman and child. One worked at William’s Variety Story (and he was quite friendly when we showed up as customers); the other was a law clerk.

  I did befriend Waylon Marcell, the Methodist minister. I joined the choir and promised to help with Sunday school after regular school settled down. The other choir members were cordial but distant. After a few rehearsals I recognized the plain fact that it was a class and regional conflict; I was an Eastern upper-class woman, and to some of them I might as well have come from China. They did warm up after a few months.

  Waylon Marcell would change my life. His church was doing informal missionary work (what we now might call “outreach”) with a band of Arapaho families camped outside of town, and he wondered whether I, as an “educated woman,” might get through to the women better than he. They just stared at him and made no comment, unlike the men, who enjoyed argument.

  I had no luck at the time. But in the winter, huddled around the smoky fire in a tipi on Sunday afternoons, they would ask and answer questions. It would be good training for my future.

  The months and years pass.

  Teachers today would have a low opinion of the way we taught in the 1890s, but it served the students’ needs. I delivered facts to them, and enforced memorization by repetition, and then tested their memories. Authorities nowadays would feel I was stifling their creativity, but in fact we hardly had time to cover the basics.


  Many, perhaps most, of the children in Dodge lived on farms, and they had jobs to do in season, which of course could not be put off. I was to find out that attendance was pretty good in the winter, subject to storms, but during planting and harvest I would be lucky to have three-quarters attending at any given day. Not the same three-quarters, either; families were large in those days, and the children would trade off. You had to have sympathy for them, but it didn’t make teaching easy. I was in charge of seventy-two students, and keeping track of who had missed which lesson was quite a bookkeeping chore.

  It was not easy on Daniel to be the teacher’s son. There was taunting and, on a few occasions, fights with the class bullies. My own difficulty, teaching him, was in resisting the natural inclination to favor him—and then resisting the contrary instinct to be too harsh on him, so that he would not seem to be favored. He was a subtle young man, though, and clearly understood the tightrope I was walking.

  The work was tiring but curative, like diving into a pool whose waters conferred forgetfulness. Philadelphia was lost in the day-to-day minutiae of teaching and administration.

  Daniel was a handful, as any boy would be, growing through his teens. His initial disappointment with Dodge, though, gave way to a kind of worldly status, a big-city bravado. Few of his classmates knew anything of life except on the plains, and Philadelphia was much more exotic to them than Dodge City had been to Daniel.

  A couple of months into the school year, and after I started teaching Sunday school, I suddenly realized that I was happier than I had been since college. And more at peace with myself than I had ever been.