Messenger by Moonlight

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Dedicated to the memory of the women of the Pony Express:

Mrs. Tom Perry, Kennekuk Station, Kansas

Mrs. John E. Smith, Seneca Station, Kansas

Mrs. George Guittard, Guittard Ranch, Kansas

Mrs. Sophia Hollenberg, Hollenberg Station, Kansas

Mrs. George Comstock, Thirty-Two Mile Creek Station, Nebraska

Mrs. Molly Slade, Horseshoe Station, Nebraska

Mrs. Moore, Three Crossings Station, Utah

The “three English women,” Green River Station, Utah

Mrs. David Lewis, Ham’s Fork Station, Utah

The “French Canadian Wife,” Muddy Creek Station, Wyoming

And those whose names were not recorded, but whose labor fueled the men who ran the race

Thank you, Christina Boys, editor extraordinaire, for never losing faith in this story… or in me.

Thank you, Janet Kobobel Grant, for your continued encouragement and guidance.

Thank you, Daniel, for sharing my passion for history, for listening to countless read-aloud sessions, and for allowing my imaginary friends to become yours, too.

Thank you, Judith McCoy Miller and Nancy Moser, for faithful prayers, treasured friendship, and brainstorming brilliance.

Thank you, Katherine McCartney, Site Administrator at Hollenberg Pony Express Station Historic Site in Hanover, Kansas, for your encouragement, knowledge, and selfless enthusiasm for this project.

… the driver exclaims:

“HERE HE COMES!”

Buchanan County, Missouri, 1855

After five years of hoping, fourteen-year-old Annie Paxton had finally stopped waiting for Pa to come back from wherever his soul had gone the day Ma died. Hunkered down in the lean-to, she pulled her pillow over her head to shut out the noise. In the next room, Pa yelled and swore while Emmet and Frank tried to calm him down, Annie willed herself to take in a deep breath while she recalled the sound of Ma’s soothing voice reciting the Shepherd’s Psalm. Annie knew the entire passage, but she focused on the first few words, emphasizing a different word with each repetition.
The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd.

A thud in the other room signaled what Annie hoped would be the end of tonight’s confrontation. She pulled the pillow away to listen. Emmet—always the peacemaker, always calm and quiet—was talking in low, mellow tones, and while Annie couldn’t quite catch the words, she could imagine them.
Let us help you to bed, Pa. Annie’s already turned in. We don’t want to wake her.

But Pa was bad tonight. Really bad. “
We
don’t want to wake her? What you talking about,
we
? You don’t speak for me. You got no idea what I want!” Pa blathered on with
cursings Ma never would have allowed. Then again, Annie didn’t remember Pa ever cursing when Ma was still alive.

The Lord is my shepherd.
Shuffling footsteps approached the doorway between the cabin’s all-purpose main room and the lean-to. Annie pressed herself as close to the log wall as she could manage. Pa was standing in the doorway. She could smell sweat and whiskey. She pressed her eyes closed, willing the tears away. They leaked out anyway. She held her breath.

“Pa.” Emmet’s voice again. Closer, this time. “She’s asleep, Pa.”

Pa mumbled something about a “poor little motherless gal” and how she didn’t deserve to lose her ma.

Frank spoke up then, agreeing. They didn’t deserve to lose Ma, he said. Frank wasn’t like Emmet. Given a choice between backing down or fighting, Frank would fight.

Annie relaxed a little when she heard Pa moan, “I don’t deserve you kids. Didn’t deserve my Tennessee belle, and don’t deserve you-ns.”

A shard of bitterness pierced Annie’s heart. Maybe Pa didn’t “deserve” his kids, but couldn’t he love them anyway? Couldn’t he at least try? When Ma died, Emmet had taken up the farming Pa neglected, though he’d only been fourteen at the time. Nine-year-old Frank, Annie’s twin, had helped, while Annie took on the cooking and cleaning and gardening and milking and chicken-tending. Neighbors had stepped up for a while, but Pa’s penchant for drunken displays eventually ended that.

Pa began to cry, and Annie put the pillow back over her head. She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear him say how sorry he was and how he’d do better. Sorry or not, he never did any better.

The Lord is my shepherd.
Lately, Annie had focused on
that phrase alone in the psalm, avoiding the rest, because all the questions she had about it made her feel guilty. Maybe she’d understand it better if they went to church. Maybe she could ask a preacher sometime. Emmet remembered going to church with Ma, but Annie didn’t think he’d appreciate his younger sister questioning the Word of God. After Ma died, when Annie couldn’t reason the answers to her questions about the Shepherd’s Psalm, she just stopped reciting the whole thing. Instead, she clung to that first phrase, comforted by the vague notion of someone powerful being her shepherd.

She still thought about the rest of the passage, though, and the mention of
green pastures
and
goodness and mercy
. It would be nice if the farm wouldn’t grow so many weeds. Both the mules and the milk cow would surely enjoy green pastures. But the phrase that caused her the most trouble was the one right at the beginning. The words
I shall not want
just flat-out haunted her, because she did “want.”

She wanted Pa to stop drinking and to help Emmet and Frank with the farm. She wanted a real home, with a front porch and curtains at the windows—real curtains, not the flour sacks Ma had decorated with embroidered bluebirds. She wanted to live somewhere where people didn’t think of her as one of those “poor Paxton kids.” She wanted to go to a nice church with a choir and maybe even a stained-glass window like the one she’d seen the only time she’d made the twenty-mile journey to St. Joseph. And she wanted friends.

It was quiet out in the main room now. She turned onto her back, staring toward the rafters.
The Lord is my shepherd.
She closed her eyes.
Please don’t be mad at me. I do want. So much.