Authors: Nancy E. Turner
When it was finished, there was not a single part of me that did not feel worn and exhausted and sore. My eyelids are sore. My fingers are weak. I cannot hold the baby in my own hands, she feels like she weighs about a hundred pounds in a little block like a sack of flour. Lord, tell me this is the last one I will ever have, and I will be forever grateful. If I had had any idea, I would have never married as long as I lived. Even Savannah said she had been worried, that it took so very long, and so much laboring. Hers was not as bad as mine was, she says. Then she brought me the baby and helped me to try to nurse her. Savannah, I said, do you reckon I’ll die yet before I get over this?
No, no, she said. Don’t even think such a thing. You just rest and let us tend you and you get well.
I can sit enough to hold the baby and nurse and to write a little. Her name is April Alice. She is a little dark haired thing, all red faced when she cries, which she does a lot. She is perfect and I love her fiercely, like a mama grizzly, I suspect. Every time I sleep I have terrible dreams, and still many pains and cramps. In my head I feel like I want to get up, but just trying to tend to my personal needs is almost more than I can do, and it is embarrassing to ask for help to the outhouse like I was a child. So I sink back into the bed, half thankful for it and half hating it. Dear Savannah. Dear Mama. Precious baby. Sleep baby, please just sleep now.
October 20, 1883
I wonder if every new mother feels as if there is nothing left of herself. Every minute of my day and every last thing I do is tied to this little someone else. I am scared to death I will do something wrong, and she will die or grow up meager or sickly. And I got to thinking about all kinds of things like, how will I know how to teach her not to be selfish? And, how will I teach her to be honest? And how will I know if she has a sickness when she is too little to say what hurts? I am driving my mother to distraction asking her questions.
November 11, 1883
Savannah delivered another baby boy today. His name is Joshua David. It was just like before for her, she struggled for about five hours and then it was over. She was calm as a dove, and made me feel ashamed of how frightened I had been with mine. There is no outrunning fear, though, it comes on you and you have to face it. Childbirth is not an enemy you can fight or conquer or outrun, it takes you and tears you apart from the inside out and you have to just submit to it. I never understood why a girl would choose to be an old maid, but now I do.
November 14, 1883
I went to see Savannah and little Joshua today, and brushed and braided Savannah’s hair for her. I only stayed about an hour because I was so exhausted, and when I got home, Jimmy said, When are you going to tend to your own house and get some washing done? Then he said, If you got enough strength to drive a buckboard over there you got enough to iron me a clean shirt.
Then he went off to do some work and I tried to do some wash, and cried all afternoon. I got the wash hung up by night fall while April screamed at the top of her lungs the whole time. Most of the wash is diapers, and I only have a few left. And now I see it is starting to rain and supper isn’t made yet and Jimmy is still cantankerous, but the baby is sleeping and I wish I could, too, but I must cook something.
December 18, 1883
What a wonderful Christmas present to see Ernest William Prine coming up the road. He was wearing a uniform with corporal stripes on the arms, and looking all filled out and like a man we hardly recognize. He stopped on the way home and had his picture made, and has given us each a little one to remember him by.
We sat around Albert’s and Savannah’s big stone fireplace and talked until late. Jimmy went home early to tend stock, but I spent the night. I nursed little April and listened to Ernest tell stories of his life, and he rolled up his sleeve and showed us where an arrow had gone clear through his arm.
He will be staying a week, then has to start back. He is bound for Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas now. We all have much to tell him and show him. I have missed Ernest dearly, and begged him to stay with us at least one night, and he said he will.
December 25, 1883
Christmas dinner today was hectic and scattered and everyone seemed almost glad to be done with it. Between my baby crying four or five hours in spite of anything I tried, and Savannah’s new one and little Clover wanting attention, I burned the pies nearly black and forgot to put salt in the crust to boot. If it wasn’t for Mama and Harland helping nothing would have been done at all. Jimmy stayed in the barn working on the horses but kept coming in every few minutes asking if supper was ready yet, until I could tell Mama was about to light into him. Every time little April fell asleep in my arms I tried to lay her down. She would start crying again and no one could soothe her for another hour or more. I am fit to be tied.
I see Savannah and Albert both tending their tiny ones and they seem so calm. But even Savannah couldn’t calm my April, she just shook her head and didn’t know what to say.
February 13, 1884
A new year is upon us. Little April sleeps more now and I am feeling as if I have gotten over the childbirth. Mama said it took so long because I didn’t get any rest. She has come a few times and carried April home, and I just stretched out on the bed and slept hard for three or four hours, and that helped more than anything.
Jimmy went to town. It is cold and frosty, but not rainy. I kind of like the way the cold air smells and the way everything sounds early in the morning in the winter. Saw a flock of geese flying in a V today. You don’t see geese often here. They made a strange noise, calling to each other. I thought about trying to shoot one for supper, but then I decided to just watch them fly away.
April 1, 1884
Jimmy has gone to the stage station to get mail. I have not written this journal so long because I am busy with my sweet baby. I love her but she cries so much and is so peevish. She seems to have colic often, and I have tried every remedy known, but to no use. She is finally sleeping through at least seven hours at night, so I am not always so wrung out. It is hard to get much done, trying to tend her all day. I don’t know how Savannah does it with two, but hers both sleep more, maybe that’s how.
Jimmy works hard all day and doesn’t understand how I get so little done, but he isn’t the one trying to do it all with a colicky baby on his shoulder night and day. Every time I sit still for more than five minutes I fall asleep.
Some men came and bought two horses for eighty dollars each. Jimmy has bought steel water troughs and a rocking chair for me and two chests of drawers and some tools and seed. Our house is the only white painted house in the Territory, as people have remarked about it to us. I am proud we have a fine ranch.
May 1, 1884
Have felt a deep sadness all this week. Not sure why. Our ranch is prosperous and some mares are expecting again but I told him not Rose, she can wait a year. We had a big argument over how he wanted to get all the use he could from his brood mares, and I said, Well, Rose is mine and has been given to me twice, and isn’t yours to USE and I don’t want her pregnant and that is my decision.
Jimmy was mad and said it would serve me right if Dan or Terry got her and then the pony would be worthless.
Jimmy works hard all day every day but seems lately he is always short tempered with me. Maybe I should have let him breed Rose if it made all that difference to him. He seems to have a lot of business in Tucson, too, but doesn’t prefer me to go along, although sometimes I’d like to.
Some Easterners drove out from the stage line and came by just to admire the place, and it filled me with a mean feeling, like they took pleasure from our hard work and they didn’t deserve it. I’m about to give up being righteous and generous to a fault, and I feel like a draft horse that has pulled all day.
Took some scraps for quilts over to Mama’s. Harland was doing lessons, Savannah’s babies were both there sleeping side by side on a quilt on Mama’s bed. Mama gave me coffee with milk in it and said it would perk me up, so I went out under the peach trees to sip on it. The trees that we brought from Texas are bending down with fruit that is not ripe yet, and beautiful, and all seems peaceful here, although not as orderly and white painted and fancy as our ranch, it is calm and welcoming here and cool in the shade of the fruit orchard.
Sitting there on a rush chair I saw Savannah walk from her house across the way over to where Albert was digging an irrigating trench, bringing him a pail of something to drink. They talked a bit, then they smiled hard at each other, and Albert bent down and kissed her like a man shouldn’t do in public. He kissed her long and hard, and she wrapped her arms around him, and nuzzled her whole body against him, and smiled, and he held her tight to him and I could see them both sigh together like they were one person.
Again I wondered what it must be like to be Savannah, and be loved like that, and maybe in time will that happen to me and Jimmy? Must be her good and simple ways, and Bible study. I haven’t been kissed at all since months before the baby came, much less kissed like they were doing.
I thanked Mama for the coffee and left. And I just can’t quit this sad feeling, lonesome and achey.
When I got home, Jimmy hollered, Sarah, you been wasting time, iron me some shirts, I’m going to town.
July 22, 1884
It seems Jimmy does more hollering at me than talking, and today I had my fill when he started complaining about his eggs being too cold. I turned around and lit into him like a wet hen. I told him he could just hold his tone of voice and act like he was married to me instead of like I was a field hand he’d hired, and that if he didn’t like it that was too bad. I have had enough of being fussed at when I am doing my level best and never once have shirked a chore as long as I was able. I told him he didn’t even act like he loved me at all, and for a married man he was about as nice to have around as a cholla cactus and a lot more noise. He just stood there like I’d hit him on the head with a stick, and then went to the barn and then came in later and said he figured he’d been pretty ornery. He said I was right, and he hadn’t realized he was making me so mad. Well, what did he think, that I would just take all his hollering forever?
I wonder if he’ll gentle down a little, now. He even helped me put April to bed tonight.
July 27, 1884
Today I stood for hours and hours under a big palo verde tree in the afternoon rain, and let the wind blow around me and wished the lightning would strike me down. My shoes were soaked through with mud from Jimmy’s grave, and I stared at the mud trying to figure. It made no sense, but I let the rain soak me through and I cried. And it wasn’t for Jimmy it was for me.
Most of what we think happened is from Ruben Maldonado tracking the signs of brush and dirt and broken branches later. Jimmy had been out rounding up some horses he let run in the east section of our land when his big old chestnut stallion stepped in a hole and lost his balance. There was cougar track nearby too, and maybe it scared the stallion. He threw Jimmy hard and we think he landed on a jagged tree stump because that’s where the trail of blood began. That alone would have been bad enough but his foot caught in the stirrup and he must have hollered real loud and the stallion took off running for home. He pulled Jimmy through the worst of our land until he was over the rocky ledge where he lost his footing and jostled enough to shake Jimmy’s foot out.
Standing in the garden I saw the horse come back looking wild eyed and rank, and put him in the corral without taking off the saddle.
I got on Rose’s back and hitched up my skirt in the waistband and hugged her with my legs. It wasn’t hard to follow the horses’ clumsy tracks, as I saw the direction he came from and the rocky ledge wasn’t far from the house. But it was real hard to look at Jimmy’s face, all cut and torn.
He moaned when I tried to move him. I rode back to the house and got a big blanket for him to lay on. I made a rope around her neck and made Rose pull Jimmy real gently back to the house. Baby April was crying inside. There was nothing I could do but let her cry, and I dropped off the rope and rode hell bent for Albert.
My family and our neighbors did all they could do for him. But his back was broken, some ribs were gone, and blood dribbled out his mouth without stopping for three days. Instead of making water he made blood pee too, and he had no feeling in his feet or legs at all, but he knew he was bad. I know he was in pain and it was hard for him to breathe and I stayed by his side without sleeping trying to comfort him.
Finally, on the fourth day everyone was so tired and knew the end was close. I sat staring at his broken body in our soft bed thinking but not thinking, the same thoughts running through my mind over and over. My beautiful life with Jimmy would soon be over and it had barely begun. Our sunrise was night. The next name entered in our little family Bible would be the last one.
I thought it was as sad as I could be at the time.
Savannah made me take a bath, and it felt good to be cleaned up although I felt hollowed out inside. I went back to the chair which had been my home all those days and sat nearby. Albert alone was by his side, standing over Jimmy, looking somber. Everyone else had gone out to the parlor and was eating some supper and talking soft about where to dig his grave.
Then Jimmy stirred and said to Albert, Tell her I love her, will you?
I began to let tears run down my face.
Albert said, You go ahead and tell her, Jimmy, she can hear you.
But Jimmy said, No, you have to write her and tell her I love her, please.
Albert said, Write her?
Then Jimmy said, Tell Miss Ruthanne I loved her always, and he let out a long breath and died.
December 1, 1884
If it wasn’t for the good neighbors we have in the Maldonados, I would have given up by now. I rise early and work the day through with my baby on my hip and go to bed with the sun and sleep hard the night through. I am tireder than I knew was possible. Sometimes one of the girls comes over and helps with April, and Estrellita is real good with her so that I can get a lot done. I am sure that the Lord’s way is right, but it is tedious and sorrowful.