Messenger by Moonlight (14 page)

He looked up at Annie. “I know I act like I was hatched under a rock, but I weren’t. My ma used to make some mighty good preserves.” He held out his mug and Annie poured more coffee. “Thank you, Ma’am.”

“You’re welcome. And if that doesn’t fill you up, there’s more. Just holler and I’ll serve it up.”

George Morgan lingered over his ledger while Reynolds ate and then Morgan offered to show him to the soddy. Annie thought that rather odd. After all, the soddy was right there in plain sight. Oh well. In the short time since she’d met him, Annie’d realized that understanding a man who barely said three words at a time probably wasn’t going to be possible. She resumed her cleaning and sorting. She intended to scrub every square inch of the kitchen and the storeroom including the walls and floors. She would even scrub the shelf George
Morgan had ordered her not to use. She’d just discovered a bag of raisins tucked into a crock she’d expected to be empty and thought
raisin molasses pie
when Jake Finney came in the back door.

“Came to check the traps for you,” he said. “George was going to do it, but I told him I would. He’s got his hands full right now with some wagon master that wants to trade for fresh oxen.”

Annie stepped to the door and looked toward the barn. She’d been so busy scrubbing and cleaning she hadn’t even heard a wagon roll in. But there was no wagon. “Where’s the wagon? Are the oxen so bad they can’t even make it to the barn?”

“Oh, no. The wagon master had them stay up on the trail.”

“But—why?”

“Billy said something about knowing him from last year. He headed up a bigger group headed for Oregon. Seems to fancy himself something of a legend-in-the-making. Prides himself on making hard bargains ‘for his people.’” Jake smirked. “He actually calls them that. ‘His people.’ Anyway, he wants George to go to the oxen, not the other way around. In case he decides George won’t deal. Hey. That Reynolds isn’t much of a talker, is he?”

“He was tired,” Annie said. “He seemed to appreciate the preserves I put on his bread.”

“Said he was a cowhand down Salina way when he heard about the Express. Doesn’t play checkers. Didn’t seem interested in much of anything but getting some sleep.”

“Salina’s in Kansas, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“How about that,” Annie said, smiling. “Another Kansan riding for the Pony Express.”

Jake was crouched down resetting a trap. Obviously there were more rats. Smart ones. Annie tried not to think about it.

“I don’t claim Kansas anymore. I’m liking Nebraska just fine.”

“You won’t go back then, someday?”

“Nothing to go back to,” Jake said.

“No family?”

“None I want to claim, that’s for darned sure.” He reached for the copper boiler beneath the table and left—abruptly—to haul in water.

Annie had just measured out flour and lard to make a pie-crust for her raisin molasses pie when she heard someone come in the front door. Wiping her hands, she moved toward the main room just as a woman bent down to speak to a child. A towheaded little boy Annie guessed to be about four years old. “Hello,” she called out. “Welcome to Clearwater. How can I help you?”

The woman glanced behind her. Back toward the trail. The little boy began to cough. Annie hurried to the water cooler, filled the mug with water and took it to where the woman was kneeling beside the child.

“Thankee,” she said, and urged the child to drink. “I was hopin’—while we was stopped—we got a team that ain’t gonna make it over the mountains. I told Norbert they was ailin’ but he wouldn’t listen. Now Reuben here’s taken a fever and—” The child coughed harder.

Annie crouched down beside them, more as a show of sympathy than anything else. The little boy ducked away from her and against his mother and turned his head away, but not before Annie saw the shadows beneath his eyes and the scarlet blush of his cheeks. “Bring him over to the counter,” she said. “I’ll get a cloth and you can cool his forehead with a compress.”

The woman lifted the child and did as Annie instructed. She filled a crockery bowl with water from the cooler, set it beside the child, and handed the woman the cloth.

“I was hoping you’d have some Wistar’s? In the store?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.”

“You ain’t never heard of Wistar’s? Balsam of Wild Cherry. Best thing they is for the croup. And cough. And consumption—although Arnold here ain’t got consumption. It’s the dust out on the trail. He can’t abide it. Starts every day bright eyed and bushy tailed and by noonin’ he’s feelin’ poorly.” As if on cue, the little boy began to cough yet again. His mother helped him sit up. He began to cry.

“Let me look and see,” Annie said and scooted into the storeroom. She should have come in here sooner. So she’d know what was what. She’d just about decided to run down to the barn and ask George Morgan about cough syrup when she heard an angry voice out in the main room.

“I told you to stay with the wagon!”

Annie stepped to the doorway just as a lanky, dark-haired man marched across the room and grabbed the woman by the elbow.

“We got no money for medicine. I told you that.”

The woman pulled away. “I got the butter,” she said. She looked at Annie. “Ain’t checked on it since I milked the cow this mornin’, but it’s likely nigh on to churned.” She paused. “I hang the bucket on the back and the wagon does the churnin’, ya know.”

Annie didn’t know, but she nodded as if she did. “If I’ve got what you need for the little one, I’ll be happy to trade for butter.”

“And we’ll just go without, I suppose,” the man said.

The woman held her ground. “It won’t hurt us to go a
day without butter if it’ll give little Arnold a rest from that cough.”

The man looked at Annie. “Well? You got what she wants or not?”

“I’m sure we have something. Just give me a minute.” She paused. “In the meantime, could I interest you in a… drink?”

The man looked doubtful. “Drink of what?”

“Coffee.”

“You expect I’d pay you for coffee?”

“Of course not. There’d be no charge.”

The man strode to the back door and stared off toward the barn. He shook his head. “Can’t see why it’s takin’ so long to strike a deal for a couple of cows. It’s not like there ain’t plenty of ’em just waitin’ to be yoked up and driven off.”

“Well, now,” the woman said. “Mr. Longwood’s just tryin’ to see that we aren’t taken advantage of.” She looked quickly at Annie. “Not to say the station keeper would do that.”

Her husband whipped his head about. “You mind your tongue, woman.” He pointed at Annie. “I’ll take that coffee.”

Annie hurried to pour coffee, served it, encouraged the man to take a seat “out back under the shelter where you can enjoy the spring breeze,” and then returned to the store. Finally, on a high shelf—
Must things always be on a high shelf?
—she saw a few dusty bottles of what looked like medicine. But she couldn’t read the labels. Again she needed a ladder. She’d just retrieved the crate and reached the three bottles when she heard someone clear his throat. She looked over just as George Morgan appeared at the end of the row of shelves.

“Didn’t want to startle you,” he said. “Guess I’ll need two ladders.”

“Only if you insist on putting things as high as possible,”
Annie said. She looked down at the three bottles in her hand. The child started coughing again. “The woman asked for something called Wishter’s something-or-other.”

“Wistar’s,” Morgan said.

“Yes. That’s it. But I don’t think you have any.” She looked about her. “At least I couldn’t find it.” She held up the three bottles. “Will any of these work? She offered to trade butter for the Wistar’s.”

Morgan stepped closer. He took the middle blue bottle. “This will help. If anything will.” He shook his head. “That child needs a doctor, not some home remedy.” He took the bottle back out to the main room and handed it to the woman. “This is the best I’ve got. It’ll help some. Until you see the doctor at Fort Kearny.”

“Doctor?” The man had stepped inside and called out from just inside the back door. “We got no money for a doctor.” He glanced at the boy. “He’ll be fine. Folks come west when they’ve got bad lungs, ain’t that right? The farther west we get, the better he’ll be.” He looked over at the woman. “You just see if he don’t get better. He don’t need no doctor.”

Seated on the counter, leaning against his mother, the little boy had fallen asleep. The man strode over and gave him a little shake. “Time you was gettin’ back to the wagon train, boy. Look sharp, now, ain’t nobody goin’ to carry you.”

“I’ll carry him,” George said, and glanced at the woman. “Then I can bring back the butter you were going to trade.” He looked over at the man. “Longwood’s out by the corral. Maybe you’ll want to talk to him about the cattle.”

The woman took the bottle of medicine and tucked it in her pocket. “You’d best let me carry him. He don’t take to strangers.”

Morgan put his massive hand to the child’s back, and the
little boy stirred and opened his eyes. He leaned down. “I’m just George,” he said. “All right if I carry you for your mama?” He picked the boy up. The child put his head on his shoulder.

“Well don’t that beat all,” the woman said.

After George Morgan and the woman left, Annie looked around the store, so she’d know what was where. Morgan didn’t return for a long while. When he finally did, he was driving a couple of pathetically thin oxen. Thinking she would save him the trip in with the butter, Annie walked down to the corral, but Morgan had no butter. It had “slipped his mind.”

Is too much for one tiny woman.
Mrs. Hollenberg’s warning sounded often in Annie’s mind during her first weeks at Clearwater. Truth be told, it was more of a haunting. How she regretted the saucy tone of voice she’d first used with the older woman.
Anyone can make dumplings.
What a fool she’d been. How naïve to think that cooking for Emmet and Frank and Pa had prepared her for life at a busy road ranch. At home she’d had time for things like gardening and tending chickens and their only cow. In fact, those things had been welcome distractions from the loneliness hovering over every day without Ma. Annie had thought life was hard then. She’d had no idea.

At Clearwater, Annie’s life revolved around the kitchen. She rose before dawn to make coffee and bake bread. Lunch had to be started the moment breakfast was finished. Once she’d served lunch, she had to plan for supper—unless, of course, she was serving beans, in which case she had to start supper while making breakfast. Work wasn’t even finished with the washing of the last supper dish, for if she intended to serve hot bread for breakfast, she had to mix the dough and set it to rise overnight. And, whether she ground them or not ahead of time, it paid to roast the next day’s supply of coffee beans before turning in. The days went by in a blur of mixing, grinding, kneading, roasting, scrubbing, sweeping, cooking, and cleaning.

As April gave way to May, the trail west grew busier, with dozens of outfits passing by every day. There was no way to predict when immigrants might stop at Clearwater or what they might need or want—including a fifty-cent “home-cooked meal.” Annie rarely left the station except to check in with her Rhode Island Reds. She was thankful for Billy’s watchful eye over the chicks. Most nights, she fell exhausted into bed and was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

On the rare night when she didn’t fall instantly asleep, Annie inevitably thought back to Mrs. Hollenberg’s warning. More often than not, she was tempted to think the old woman’s prediction had been right. The work was too much. The first visit from the paymaster helped strengthen her resolve to succeed or die trying—metaphorically speaking. After the man left, Annie sat in her room staring down at the open cash box in wonder. Two hundred dollars. And a gold coin. A coin she’d earned. Just feeling it in the palm of her hand made it easier to face the next day.

She often thought about the women plodding along the trail in the distance, their calico hems trailing in the dust, their bonnets tied snugly to keep the sun off their faces. Would they find what they were seeking out there in the Far West? Would their dreams come true? She wondered about the woman who’d come seeking medicine for her sick child. What would become of those two, living with an angry man unmoved by his own son’s illness? Inevitably, she remembered George Morgan holding the little boy close as he carried him for the weary, worried woman. She hoped the child was sleeping soundly at night.

By the end of the first week of May, the rest of George Morgan’s crew had arrived—a blacksmith named Hitch, half
a dozen wranglers responsible for driving the cattle out on the prairie to graze, and another trio charged with cutting firewood and fence posts in distant cedar canyons. They would alternate between that and cutting and stacking hay, all of it in preparation for winter. As for the fence posts, Morgan sold those to ranchers in the region.

After his first full circle with the mail, Frank returned to Clearwater happier than Annie had ever seen him. Emmet, on the other hand, was worried. He’d expected at least one letter from Luvina to be waiting for him at the end of his first circuit. When Annie told him no letter had arrived, disappointment dropped over him like a shroud. When she turned in that night, she peered into her brothers’ room. Emmet was sitting on the edge of his cot, his Bible open across his knees. He didn’t look her way. Right before she fell asleep, Annie offered a pathetic prayer on his behalf.
Oh Lord, Emmet’s shepherd… have mercy
.

The next morning, pewter-colored clouds obscured the blue sky. Over the next several days, a steady drizzle transformed the earth into a kind of mud George Morgan called gumbo and travelers called a variety of colorful terms that made Annie alternately blush and wonder at mankind’s creativity when it came to profanity.

The “field crew,” as George Morgan called them, had brought their own cook. They stayed mostly to themselves, but with the advent of rainy weather, they took shelter in the station every night, playing checkers and cards to while away the time. Annie learned that George Morgan was something of a legend when it came to checkers. He inevitably won, even if he played with only two checkers. She also learned that Frank liked to play cards, something that would have concerned her except for the fact that George Morgan wouldn’t
allow gambling at Clearwater—not even when Hitch promised they’d bet navy beans instead of pennies.

The mud and rain made travel difficult, but it didn’t keep the stage from delivering the three newspapers Morgan subscribed to—the
Nebraska City News
, the
St. Joseph Gazette
, and the
Philadelphia Leader
. When he wasn’t playing checkers, the station keeper spent rainy evenings standing behind the store counter, a newspaper spread before him. One evening when Annie was making the rounds to serve fresh coffee to the men, she paused near the counter and asked Morgan why he subscribed to a Philadelphia paper.

He didn’t even look up. “It’s home. Or was. A long time ago.”

“Really? I’m surprised to hear it.”

He took a sip of coffee, peering at her over the rim of the cup. Finally, he said, “I can see that. Why?”

She was sorry she’d said anything. “I just—I don’t know.” She did know, but she wasn’t about to tell George Morgan. People from big cities were refined, and their speech showed it. Both the Patee House dining room and the ballroom had buzzed with conversation. People even talked while they were dancing. George Morgan’s interchanges with people could barely be called conversations. He was abrupt to the point of rudeness. Annie could not imagine him fitting into any kind of life in a big city. He didn’t bother to trim his beard, and it had clearly been a very long time since he’d cut his hair. Of course she could never tell him that, and so she apologized. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Luther said you’d been a trader before you built Clearwater. Billy said you’d spent some time with the Pawnee. I thought you were from out here.”

Morgan set the coffee mug down. “The only people ‘from out here’ are Pawnee. Cheyenne. Sioux.”

Well, of course she knew that. She also knew the expression
on his face all too well. She saw it every time she did or said something George Morgan thought ignorant.

Now he actually scowled down at the backs of his hands as he asked, “You think I look Indian?”

So much for trying to have a conversation about something beyond rats in the pantry or troublesome chickens Morgan labeled “doomed to die.” Annie shook her head. “Of course not. Then again, the only Indian I know happens to have blue eyes. I don’t suppose most people would think Billy ‘looks Indian’—whatever that means.”
There.
That wiped the frown off his face. She turned to go.

“Wait. I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

Annie whirled back around. “Didn’t mean what, Mr. Morgan? To make me feel even more ignorant?”

He just stared at her for a moment. Finally, he swept a hand across the surface of the newspaper. “I recognize an occasional name. There’s an odd comfort in that. I don’t know why. And you’re not ignorant.”

Well. That was something.
He didn’t think her ignorant—and he liked reading about home. Just like Annie, who enjoyed the
St. Joseph Gazette
. Not that St. Joseph was home—yet. But it would be. “Perhaps you miss Philadelphia.”

“Don’t miss it. Never regretted leaving.”

Then why do you find comfort in reading that newspaper?

Morgan must have seen doubt on her face. “Leaving meant I didn’t have to listen to my father’s favorite lecture anymore—the one about the son who repeatedly failed to measure up. By the time I left, I’d titled it.” He held up both hands to create quotations marks in the air as he said, “‘Destined to Disappoint.’”

How awful.
“Our pa used to say things like that to Frank. Mostly that he’d never amount to anything.”

Morgan grunted softly. “Well—your pa was wrong about Frank.”

“Yes. And your father was wrong about you.” Annie motioned about them. “Look what you’ve built.”

“This place you never wanted to come to and can’t wait to leave?”

Annie protested. “Just because I—”

Morgan interrupted her. “There’s another reason I like to read a back-East newspaper. There’s war in the wind, and I like reading a back-East perspective on the situation. Lately, the
Gazette
is little more than rattling sabers. You’d think shots had already been fired.”

Annie nodded. St. Joseph hadn’t been the most peaceful place back in March. North-versus-South sentiments had been evident even then, both in newspapers and on the streets.

Morgan pointed to a headline in the
Leader
. “Here’s news that’ll interest you. The telegraph is expected to reach Fort Kearny by fall. I expect the Pony will add another official stop so riders can pick up the latest news.”

Not long after the brief conversation, Annie returned to the kitchen and began preparations for the next day’s meals. As she worked, she mulled over the things she’d learned this evening. Morgan had grown up in the East. When he thought about his father, he remembered disapproval and the awful words
destined to disappoint.
Pa’s last years had been awful, but if she chose to, Annie could reach beyond those years and call up good memories. She wondered if George Morgan could do the same—if he tried. She hoped so.

One thing from the conversation stood out more than anything else, though.
He doesn’t think I’m ignorant.
It was good to know it. Very good.

When the gray canopy obscuring blue sky finally gave way to sunshine, the world around Clearwater was transformed. Green prairie stretched away from the station like an emerald carpet, and wildflowers began to bloom. Luther had been right about Mother Nature’s paintbrush.

One day, Annie stole away to gather a bouquet. Back in the kitchen, she laid the flowers on her worktable and retreated to her room to retrieve the damaged lavender and white teapot she’d often used as a vase. The finish was crackled, the spout chipped, and there was no lid, but none of that mattered. It had been Ma’s, and that made it precious. The delicate design—a drawing of a well-dressed couple standing on a path leading to a castle in the distance—contrasted sharply with Clearwater’s rustic crockery and plain white dishes. As she arranged the flowers, Annie smiled, envisioning the day when she’d be able to order an entire set of dishes reminiscent of Ma’s teapot.

She had just set the finished bouquet on her worktable when George Morgan opened the exterior door that led into her kitchen storeroom and asked her to come outside. After gathering up the leaves and stems she’d trimmed away while arranging her bouquet, Annie complied. Morgan indicated a pile of weathered boards in the back of a nearby wagon before pointing to the space between the open storeroom door and the arbor shading the back entrance to the main room.

“I thought you’d want it close.”

Annie stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Billy has more important things to do than tending chickens.” He pointed at the space again. “So. Is this all right?

Oh. He’s going to build a chicken coop.
“I—yes,” Annie stammered.

“It shouldn’t take long.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I could have rented that stall more than once last week if it wasn’t housing a hen party. So I’ll build your coop. But I still don’t think they’ll last. They’re too scrawny to thrive out here.” He began to unload the lumber.

Annie went back inside. Grabbing the broom, she began sweeping, muttering to herself as she worked. Just when the man seemed to be doing something nice, he buried it beneath a thick layer of
don’ts. Don’t
thank him.
Don’t
expect the chickens to live. And for goodness sake,
don’t
expect Billy to tend them. As if she’d asked Billy to do that. She’d actually told him not to pay them any mind. She’d told him she’d see to them. Was it her fault if Billy seemed to
like
tending chickens?