A Light in the Wilderness (26 page)

“Yup, it’s me, Pa. Came on board ship like I said I would.” He looked around. “Nice place you got here.” He looked at Letitia. “See you still got your . . . woman.”

“And a good one she is. You visiting or settling?”

“Depends. Partial toward settling.”

“You’re in time then. You can put in for 160 acres, being you’re a single man. I’m gonna try to get my full 640 but not much chance of it.”

“Why not?” Junior squatted to stroke the dog’s head.

Letitia listened with a hollow pit in her stomach.

“People of color don’t qualify for land. And since we ain’t married under the law . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “Our neighbors’ wives, they’ll get property in their own right under this claim. Add 320 acres to their husband’s acreage.”

Excluded
. Betsy’s people were excluded too. Couldn’t claim the land they’d lived on for generations.

“So the 320 acres you’ve been fencing you can’t have, I can file on it?”

Davey hesitated, like he might ask Letitia’s opinion. “Don’t know why not. It’ll be good to have you around. Look after things when I pack into California. Or maybe come with me. You’ll have to reside here for four consecutive years to get title, but traveling south now and then won’t count against you.” He patted his son on the shoulder. “Tisha, rustle up some grub here for Junior. Sure and it’s a fine, fine morning when a man’s son comes calling.”

In February, Davey and Junior rode together to Oregon City to meet with the surveyor general to make their claims. Letitia suspected that was the real reason Davey came back when he did. Micah Read also went so the men could be witnesses for each other about how long they’d been in the Soap Creek Valley and the boundary lines they’d honored. He came home and said he’d met up with a David Davis who had property northeast of them. He’s courting Sarah Bowman. Her husband died last year.”

“Miss Sarah’s widowed?”

“That she is. Seems to be an epidemic. Sure hope you don’t catch it any time soon.”

Neighbors came to help Junior raise his cabin late that fall. At last Letitia would be freed of cooking for Junior and cleaning his clothes. They fed his horse. He didn’t seem to have much in the way of supplies to farm, so he borrowed their plow and spades and extra dishware too. Nancy offered a quilt; Frances Gage brought berry pies.

“What about those beds the Indians are using. Can’t a man have one of those?” This from Junior the day after the raising.

“Make one for yourself.” Letitia slammed the spider a little harder than intended, broke eggs for breakfast into the three-legged pan.

“Now, Tish. A man gets tired sleeping on the floor,” Davey said. “Maybe Betsy’d give up that hammock she made.”

“You give away my things but you’ve no right handin’ off Betsy’s.”

“I’d ask first.” He sounded wounded.

“They got no right being here anyway,” Junior said.

“They here before any of us.” She heard the biting tone and took a deep breath. Holding resentment was like stoking a fire while waiting for rain. “I makes you a hammock.”

Junior scratched at his full mustache, his brown eyes held a hint of glee. “Sure and that’d be a kind thing, then, for a mother to give her son.”

Davey smiled. “Good to see the two of you getting along.”

Junior wasn’t a grateful man, sour even when he appeared to have everything he wanted. Land. A cabin. A cow and pig given to him by his father—and her, which Junior did not acknowledge. His father’s love and attention. He scowled whenever Davey bounced Adam—whom Davey started calling Jack—on his knee or had a tea party with Martha. At least if she made Junior a hammock it might be a little harder for him to make their home a place for every meal, carrying with him his poor disposition as a hearty appetite.

For the next two years, each spring Davey loaded the pack mules and took their goods south to sell. Junior went with him, and Letitia and Rothwell stood watching while the pack animals trotted after the men down the trail. It meant more work for her and Little Shoot to look after Junior’s hog and cow, but she adjusted to the time without Davey or Junior around. She set her own schedules, made decisions that didn’t have to be negotiated with him nor have surprises of plans he’d made with Junior he hadn’t bothered to mention to her. She visited Frances Gage and quilted while Martha and Adam slept on the Gages’ large bed. Her son had the same pecan color as his sister and he had Davey’s high forehead and strong chin. The apple trees bore fruit. Letitia was asked to midwife more than once. At Nancy Read’s, she marveled at the new additions she’d helped deliver.

“I thought Perry would be my last, but now here’s Clara. I wouldn’t have missed meeting her for the world. But really, Clara is my last.”

“Wild carrot grows here. Using them keeps Clara your last. Or that sponge. Betsy tell me that.”

“Oh, Micah would never approve. Goodness, I’ll have to be strong and keep getting stronger.”

During Davey’s absences, Betsy stayed again near the cabin. She’d moved closer to the village of her people when Junior returned, but with the men gone, Betsy helped Letitia hang baskets of plants and herbs, roots and berries, and dried salmon from the rafters. The smoked fish cast a pleasant scent. The Kalapuya woman showed Adam how to hold a bow much too big for the two-year-old boy. She taught seven-year-old Martha to wrap hazel shoots into one of the bigger baskets for storing roots and vegetables from Letitia’s garden.

Letitia would lie in her bed at night and consider how her life had changed in this country and all she’d learned about living in a family of her own choosing. Betsy was a school for her and her children, one she attended with anticipation when Davey wasn’t around having her do things for him. Little Shoot became a young man before her eyes, once bringing a pretty girl to help make cheese. Everything changed. Letitia wondered if finding peace in the time Davey left her meant she loved him less, or if discovering strengths within herself made it easier to live with his warts and accept her own. Perhaps her enjoying the solitary time was a sign of greater love between them. Maybe even greater trust so she wouldn’t really have needed that paper in her cupboard.

Davey kept his word that year and and was only gone for a few weeks at a time. The exclusion law stood and now there was a law forbidding persons of color to testify against a white man. If a white neighbor stole something from a colored man, the courts were no recourse.

Letitia had heard that G.B. Smith was back in the area and had married. Maybe that was why he’d left her alone after that last encounter. His young wife, Eliza Hughart, whom he’d sniffed around at on the overland journey, died in childbirth. Letitia hadn’t midwifed that birth. She didn’t know who did, but she was sure the midwife grieved the loss of the mother. The baby—named for G.B.’s brother—must have kept G.B. occupied, though the next year he married Mary Baker.

“He’s put himself up as an administrator for public things, executing probates and wills,” Nancy told her. “His brother died last year in Hawaii and he’s been working on that estate.” With a pulley, Nancy lowered her quilt frame from the ceiling while Letitia
helped settle the frame on the floor. She brought cheese and butter for the small inn the Reads now ran. “Heirs aren’t too happy with his handling of things, or so I hear. But the court keeps appointing him. Micah says he’d never do business with the man. He may not do illegal things, but Micah says he’s on the edge of ethical.”

Letitia wished G.B.’s new wife well and prayed for her at the same time. She put Greenberry Smith out of her mind and found quiet joy in the life she’d come to lead. A small village south of them named Corvallis had sprung up, with a blacksmith shop, an attorney, and a mercantile, but she had no interest in going there. She stayed at home. She was the keeper of the hearth who stoked the fires, served friends when they came by, and welcomed Davey back when he’d been gone. She fed her children and the dog. She listened to Davey’s stories when he returned but had no desire to go to California or anywhere else. She was as free as she had ever been. She was at home in Benton County.

Davey always returned happy, lifted his children in the air and swirled them, one by one, until their happy giggles rang through the valley in the shadow of Coffin Butte.

“Don’t know why I leave,” he said. “Ain’t nothing as nourishing as these hills, this farm, you and these wee ones.”

It was on one of those trips south when Davey became sick and brought the illness back.

“Little Shoot, please go ask Mrs. Read if she take the children. They’s got their own to look after, but they like mama and papa to Martha and Adam.”

Little Shoot had become an extension to her very being, he and Betsy, always ready to help, like family.

“I take children. Bring back kasa with healing.”

Letitia handed him a biscuit as he headed out.

She didn’t want the children becoming ill and she didn’t want to leave Davey, who moaned, sweat tiny beads across his forehead,
face, and neck. He couldn’t keep down even the thin gruel of boiled wheat she made for him. His body soured the room when he missed the chamber pot, but she didn’t begrudge it. He’d have done the same for her, she was sure. He was too weak to reach the privy they’d built the year before.

“I ache all over, woman. Help me, aye, ’tis a sorry state I’m in.”

He was a child in his sickness, a child who couldn’t be comforted.

She cleaned the chamber pot, made herb poultices. Betsy arrived with a tin of the Sulphur Springs water. “This make him well.” It was the burning month, though the Indians burned much less now with all the split-rail fences and land someone else claimed marking new borders. But Letitia still wanted them to burn the sections of their land the Kalapuya had fired before. She saw how it kept the blackberries down and brought game closer to their door.

Junior didn’t want his acreage fired up nor the part that had once been any of Davey’s 640 acres. “Smoke won’t do Pa any good,” Junior charged when he stopped by one time. “Make those savages put out those flames. Here, I brought him a twist of tobacco. Let him chew.”

Davey declined and his son left with a pat on his father’s shoulder.

Davey’s breathing had become shallower.

“They almost done burning,” she told Davey. She wiped his face with a spring-soaked cloth, cooling. “I boil apples. Taste good for you.”

He shook his head, smiled a weakened grin. “We had good times, didn’t we, Tish?”

“We did.” She wiped his arms, his neck and chest. She didn’t like the tone of his talking.

Martha ran in to show him a butterfly she’d caught in her hand and then on the floor beside the bed played Noughts and Crosses with little stones and a rubber ball. She’d brought the children back because Davey missed them so.

Something caused the child to stop playing.

“It all right. Your papa feelin’ poor. He’ll be better. You take your playin’ outside. Look after Adam, now. You his big sister.”

Obedient, she rushed out.

“You’re a good mama, Tish. Couldn’t ask for no better. The greatest gift to a man’s heart. Worth more than gold.”

“What you doing making pretty talk to me now. You’ll be well soon and wonder why you say such kind things ’cause I’ll remember.” She pushed his thinning red hair back behind his ears.

“Oh, Tish. Don’t be fooling yourself.”

She felt her stomach tense.

The clearer September air didn’t improve Davey’s breathing. She asked Micah to please go for the doctor again, and while she waited she prayed for his recovery, staring out at Coffin Butte. She wanted him to see Adam and Martha grow up, for them to know their father as he grew older. He was her husband and, she realized, her closest friend.

“Just so weak. Can’t . . . can’t sit up.” A few days had passed.

He’d been ill—they both had—last year in the winter of ’51. Pertussis or whooping cough, Doc called it. They stayed with the Gages those weeks, recuperating, Frances loving the presence of Martha and Adam. Both children had a mild case and Davey had recovered first and gone back to the claim, hiring a man named Walker to stay and butcher. Later he said he hadn’t realized how much work Letitia did until she wasn’t there to anticipate what he needed done or doing it before he even considered. Junior hadn’t come around to help.

She’d recovered with Frances’s help and hadn’t been ill since, though each time the fireplace smoked back into the cabin and she coughed, she wondered if the wrenching pertussis had come visiting again.

This illness of Davey’s in September of ’52 wore a different cloak, more threadbare, letting the coldness of the inside bleed through. Davey ached and his eyes watered and turned red. The skin of his face stretched across his cheekbones showing his skull. She’d shaved his beard to make it easier to keep him clean and the skin on his chin was pale as flat bread. Doc Smith didn’t seem to know what ailed Davey.

“Can you. Feed me. Soup?”

Feed him, like he a chil’?
The cowers so long gone came roaring back. “I . . . I soaks the sourdough in the beef broth, then you brings it to your mouth. You can do it. You feeds you self.” She patted his hand, his fingers wrinkled now, the nails chipped and yellowed. “It good you keeps moving, doin’ things.”

“I . . . I can’t. Please.”

What was wrong with her? She couldn’t feed her ill husband a simple savory soup?

And then she knew. She knew that spooning that soup into Davey’s mouth would mean he was no longer able to tend himself and never would again. He was dying. She didn’t want to do anything that said his days were numbered, that he’d be gone. For all his warts and willful ways, she cared for him. Loved this man who was the father of her children. She didn’t mind washing his body, cleaning up his messes, trying remedy after remedy to help him through. But this . . . this need to feed him wound down her hope like a ticking clock. She took a deep breath. Tears pressed from the corners of his eyes. He reached for her hand; he was cold to the touch. She spooned the beef into his mouth, the broth seeping from his bluish lips.

“Findin’ time like it was lost. I looked in nooks and crannies trying to find more time for us.” She wiped the corner of his mouth. “Treasurin’ the seconds, minutes driftin’ like snowflakes meetin’ on the taste buds. Did we forget to make time? Is that how I lost you, Davey Carson?” Her voice caught.

“You made time. It’s how we found each other.” He looked up at her and smiled. “Did my best, aye. Hoping the Lord noticed.”

David Carson died on September 22, 1852. Letitia asked Nancy to put the date into his Bible and to add Martha’s and Adam’s births as well. He had neglected to include them. He neglected many things, but he’d done as he’d said: his best. Surely the Lord would ask for no more.

Doc Smith signed the death certificate, told her he’d let authorities know and the itinerant pastor when he came around, so she could have a service. “Best we bury him soon.”

Little Shoot and Micah and his boys and Joseph Gage helped dig the grave beneath the apple trees while Roth lay with his nose upon his paws, watching. The children stood next to her, their slender bodies warm against her thighs. Martha wore a bonnet and Letitia a new flat-topped straw hat Frances Gage had picked up for her in Corvallis. Junior kept his hat off, didn’t say a word though he listened while Micah read from the Bible, picking the verses she’d remembered giving Nancy when little Laura had died.

“‘A time for mourning.’ That be now.” She thanked Micah, accepted the Bible back, folded it into her chest, and then she began to sing in her low range, “I want Jesus to walk with me . . .”

Those who knew the words joined in
.

“Why’d we put Papa in the ground?” Martha asked. They were back at the cabin.

“His body was tired. His spirit be gone, Martha. He where he need to be. And we where the Lord want us to be too. Right here. Safe and sound.” She looked to the cupboard. She patted her daughter’s shoulder. “You play now, have a tea party with your brother with that set of dishes your papa brought back.”

“Death part of living.” Betsy fixed mint tea harvested from the wet ground when Soap Creek flooded each spring. They sat alone, the children playing as though they understood that grief settled better within silence.

Letitia had a little gold dust left, money not spent on buying cows and a bull and farm equipment and a good stove, all things Davey wanted. She had twenty-nine cows now. They belonged to her by Davey’s hand. She had the agreement. She’d be all right when it came time to settle Davey’s affairs. He had taken care of her and the children, like a good father would. That night in the cabin she let the light flicker in her candlesticks until they burned down to a nubbin.