to attend Val’s funeral, but she had visited the mausoleum. The Jannings family blamed Emmalee for having transmitted smallpox to Val. It did not matter that she had suffered and acquired immunity to the disease at an early age. Nor did they wish to hear with what selflessness she had cared for the afflicted during the winter nights. She was the cause of Val’s death; that was the only way they could see it.
Heavyhearted with this knowledge, Emmalee walked out and sat down on the lawn, wondering what to do. Today, according to the laws of the country, she was a woman. Today, according to the rules by which the Lutheran home was governed, she was free—indeed, she was admonished—to go out and find her way in the world.
That world lay bright and shining across the sparkling Mississippi. Sidewheelers and sternwheelers plied the ceaseless thoroughfare, and barges laden with all manner of men and goods fought their way upstream or drifted with the current. Across the river, as far as Emmalee could see, were the green hills of Missouri. And beyond them was the great west, always a part of Emmalee’s dreams, but which, for months, she had been too troubled to contemplate. Even today, on her birthday, she felt too disspirited to think about the future very much.
Fighting a sorrow she could do nothing to dispel, Emmalee lay down on the sun-warmed grass and closed her eyes. Flickering patterns of light, red and blue and amber, burst and reburst and danced behind her eyelids. Old earth held and cradled her. The sun was warm and loving, bathing her strong, young body in its gentle glow. She heard, down on the river, the calls of pilots and boatmen, the lowing of cattle transported to market on the barges, and the constant splash and slosh of the big paddlewheels. She smelled the coalsmoke of the steam engines that drove the paddlewheels.
My life is marked by graves, she thought.
But self-pity made her angry with herself. Emmalee sat up, bit into the strongly spiced salami, ate a chunk of bread, and took long swallows of the stone-cooled milk. Then, squinting against the sun, she began to scan the Cairo Bulletin. The rest of the world was teeming and fighting and scheming, getting on with life.
President Andrew Johnson, reeling from the twin burdens of incompetence and impeachment, stood no chance of reelection. General Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the triumphant Union army, would save the nation again, this time from the White House.
The new transcontinental railroad would revolutionize America, would bind the farflung seaboards even more effectively than the telegraph had advanced communication. All manner of immigrants had worked on the railroad, even Chinese. Emmalee had never seen any Chinese, nor any of the far places mentioned in the news.
The old spirit of her wanderlust rose again inside her. That same powerful yet obscure drive that had caused her parents to leave their comfortable little farm in the Pennsylvania hills was her heritage, and she felt it surge in her soul again as she gazed westward across the Mississippi.
She turned the page of the newspaper and found herself staring at dozens of advertisements for travel to the west.
SOUTHWESTERN COMPANY FOR CALIFORNIA
The company is putting out a train of good wagons, for the purpose of carrying passengers to central California. We will take a man through for $150, starting from Kansas City on the 12 of May, 1868…
Emmalee felt a small thrill. There was certainly no place farther west than California, at least none to which she could aspire, and there was time to get to Kansas City in a month. But then she read the notice again, with its inevitable and depressing particular: the trip would cost $150 per man or, presumably, per woman. She had perhaps ten dollars to her name, painstakingly saved from the small allowance the Reverend Bowerly had given the older children. But, as yet undaunted, she read on.
OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Heavyhearted with this knowledge, Emmalee walked out and sat down on the lawn, wondering what to do. Today, according to the laws of the country, she was a woman. Today, according to the rules by which the Lutheran home was governed, she was free—indeed, she was admonished—to go out and find her way in the world.
That world lay bright and shining across the sparkling Mississippi. Sidewheelers and sternwheelers plied the ceaseless thoroughfare, and barges laden with all manner of men and goods fought their way upstream or drifted with the current. Across the river, as far as Emmalee could see, were the green hills of Missouri. And beyond them was the great west, always a part of Emmalee’s dreams, but which, for months, she had been too troubled to contemplate. Even today, on her birthday, she felt too disspirited to think about the future very much.
Fighting a sorrow she could do nothing to dispel, Emmalee lay down on the sun-warmed grass and closed her eyes. Flickering patterns of light, red and blue and amber, burst and reburst and danced behind her eyelids. Old earth held and cradled her. The sun was warm and loving, bathing her strong, young body in its gentle glow. She heard, down on the river, the calls of pilots and boatmen, the lowing of cattle transported to market on the barges, and the constant splash and slosh of the big paddlewheels. She smelled the coalsmoke of the steam engines that drove the paddlewheels.
My life is marked by graves, she thought.
But self-pity made her angry with herself. Emmalee sat up, bit into the strongly spiced salami, ate a chunk of bread, and took long swallows of the stone-cooled milk. Then, squinting against the sun, she began to scan the Cairo Bulletin. The rest of the world was teeming and fighting and scheming, getting on with life.
President Andrew Johnson, reeling from the twin burdens of incompetence and impeachment, stood no chance of reelection. General Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the triumphant Union army, would save the nation again, this time from the White House.
The new transcontinental railroad would revolutionize America, would bind the farflung seaboards even more effectively than the telegraph had advanced communication. All manner of immigrants had worked on the railroad, even Chinese. Emmalee had never seen any Chinese, nor any of the far places mentioned in the news.
The old spirit of her wanderlust rose again inside her. That same powerful yet obscure drive that had caused her parents to leave their comfortable little farm in the Pennsylvania hills was her heritage, and she felt it surge in her soul again as she gazed westward across the Mississippi.
She turned the page of the newspaper and found herself staring at dozens of advertisements for travel to the west.
SOUTHWESTERN COMPANY FOR CALIFORNIA
The company is putting out a train of good wagons, for the purpose of carrying passengers to central California. We will take a man through for $150, starting from Kansas City on the 12 of May, 1868…
Emmalee felt a small thrill. There was certainly no place farther west than California, at least none to which she could aspire, and there was time to get to Kansas City in a month. But then she read the notice again, with its inevitable and depressing particular: the trip would cost $150 per man or, presumably, per woman. She had perhaps ten dollars to her name, painstakingly saved from the small allowance the Reverend Bowerly had given the older children. But, as yet undaunted, she read on.
OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Similar Books
Slam the Big Door
John D. MacDonald
Nomads' Fall: Burning Bastards MC
Ryder Dane
Never Neck at Niagara
Edie Claire
Longarm and the Missing Husband
Tabor Evans
Theron's Hope (Brides of Theron)
Rebecca Lorino Pond, Rebecca Anthony Lorino
Scorched Edges
L.M. Somerton
Lethal Exposure
Lori Wilde
New Year's Eve
Marina Endicott
Anna's Gift
Emma Miller