Hers the Kingdom (3 page)

     I felt Mama's fingers in my back, pushing hard.

     "Sir," I said in what was meant to be a normal tone, but in fact came out a whisper.

     Owen Reade turned to us. Before I could attempt the formal introduction Mama had wanted, Willa pulled me to her, slipped her strong arm tightly around my waist and took over as gracefully as Grandmother would have, with as sure a sense of herself.

     "Allow me, sir," she said, "to present my mother, Mrs. Kerr."

     Turning to our mother with the slightest of curtseys, as if the most obedient of daughters, she said, "Mother, Mr. Reade."

     Owen bowed and took Mama's big hand in his. He told her it was a great pleasure to meet the family of his very good friends in California. He said that Aunt Emma had sent her greetings; he said how grateful he was to Mama for allowing him to visit. He looked at Mama, and she began to quiver with pleasure.

     "And this is my sister, Lena," Willa went on, pulling me close, squeezing me so I would not be afraid.

     "Lena. Yes," he said, as if affirming something. He looked at me and he did not look away. Willa squeezed me again, and I smiled at the ground.

     Mama watched. She saw, she may even have felt the circle tighten, excluding her.

     All this while the Little Boys had been hanging back, peering from behind bushes and trees. Now Willa called them forward and introduced them, quite formally, one by one. The Middle Boys, having heard the commotion, were walking toward us, tall and awkward in that space between childhood and manhood, each pushing the other ahead so that they came at an uneven pace.

     "Come, boys, meet Mr. Reade," Willa called to them. "Mr. Reade, my brothers Persia, Berne, and Turin." Looking at the tallest of the three she went on, "Bernie, I've promised Mr. Reade a footrace—a real one." Bernie smiled and said that he would be happy to oblige. It was only in the past month that he had, finally, won a race from Willa, and he was anxious to repeat his victory.

     "I warn you," Owen Reade said, "I've been beaten by both the tortoise and the hare." Willa laughed as the light played over her face.

     "I think you must be tired, after so long a journey," Mama said, reminding Willa to show him to the room that had been made ready for him. We watched, Mama and I, as they walked together toward the house.

     "He will think her too bold," Mama told me in a husky voice, "he will think she is strange."

     For once I did not conceal my annoyance: "If he has any sense at all," I said, "he will think her extraordinary, because she is."

     On the pretext of checking on preparations for supper, I went into the kitchen where the hired girls were working, then up the steep back stairs to the room I shared with Willa. She was filling the basin in the corner when I entered. I knew the excitement I saw in her eyes was mirrored in mine. Too full of feeling to say anything right away, we sat close on the bed, our fingers tightly intertwined.

     "Mama is furious with you," I whispered. "Where were you? Why weren't you here?"

     "I was following the peregrines," Willa answered, as if it were beside the point, "I didn't want to be sitting around waiting, I didn't want to think too much about it so I decided to go hawking and I wandered too far . . ." It was not important, not now. What was important was swelling inside of us, threatening to burst.

     "He is . . ." I began, and she threw her arms around me and we laughed, too excited to talk.

     "Lena," she said, "it can't be happening . . ." We hugged each other then, in the spring of the year 1887. I was sixteen, Willa was twenty-two, and we were full of wonder at the turn of fate that had brought Owen Reade into her life and thus, obliquely, into mine.

Fate, in this case, had a name: Aunt Emma. We called her that, though she was not our aunt at all, but Mama's girlhood friend.
Aunt Emma, who lived with her husband, the Captain (of what I was never quite sure), in Monterey, California, which was south of San Francisco. She had been sixteen when she made the long journey around the Horn to California, a new bride. We had heard the story more times than I can remember—how the Captain had come to visit, how he had left at the end of the month with young Emma Douglas, Mama's great friend and companion. The Douglases were shopkeepers in town. There were eight children in the family and so many hungry mouths to feed that Emma was allowed to "farm out" to the Porters, to keep Mama company. It wasn't long after Aunt Emma left for California that Mama married Pa, the hired hand's gangly son who had tagged after the two girls all those childhood years.

     I suppose Grandmother looked on Aunt Emma as an acceptable little friend for her only child, in the way that Southern girls were allowed to have slave children as playmates. Emma Douglas was not a Negro, but her parents were poor and to Grandmother's mind, it was much the same. As for Pa's folks, the Kerrs, they were hired hands, that was all.

     Aunt Emma's departure had been followed, in rapid succession, by a series of events which changed everything. Grandfather died, Mama married Pa, Grandmother moved to Chicago. Mama married Pa and begat Willa, and begat Gibralter, and begat Valparaiso, and begat Birmingham, and begat me—who was to be the consolation of her age, as she liked to say—before she produced six more male progeny so there would always be a Kerr to work Porter farm.

     And it was to be called that: Porter Farm.

     Through all those long, childbearing years she wrote letters to Aunt Emma—great thick letters into which she poured her thoughts, her confidences. She shared everything with Emma in her letters, as they had shared everything as girls. Aunt Emma, childless, wrote back in the stolid, stilted style of a woman who was not comfortable with words, but Mama was not daunted. After a while, I think, it didn't matter who was reading the letters. All that
mattered was that Mama could write them and post them. Other than several editions of the
New Popular Atlas of the World
, which she pored over and used as a source of names for her offspring, the letters to Aunt Emma were Mama's only connection to the outside world.

     The letter that arrived in February began, as all of Aunt Emma's letters began, "Dear Good Friend." She wrote: "Your letter of the 14th inst. arrived with its welcome news of your family. We are well here, though the Captain complains of late of a weakness of limb."

     Aunt Emma and my father must have been much alike; it was as if words pained them.

     "I am putting pen to paper," Aunt Emma went on, "for a particular reason. On several occasions we have had the pleasure of having as a guest on the ranch a young gentleman, Mr. Owen Reade. On his last visit he was stricken with an illness, and at our insistence stayed with us to recuperate. Only after three months was his strength regained.

     "He is an agreeable young man and during his long recuperative time I sought to distract him by reading those parts of your letters in which you talk of the children. At the end of his time with us, he asked permission to write to Willa, for the purpose of stopping at Porter Farm on his next trip to the East.

     "Owen is twenty-seven years of age. His mother died when he was but a babe, his father passed from this life ten years ago, leaving his only son a sizeable bequest from his manufacturies in New England. The Captain knew his late father and vouches for his character. He fully endorses the young Mr. Reade, in whom he places much confidence.

     "Owen finished his studies at Princeton College, then he traveled widely on the Continent as well as throughout the American West. His travels have taken him many miles, as a result of which he has been able to enlarge the inheritance left to him. Neither is he content with this success, but is ambitious and has many fine plans.

     "He neither drinks nor smokes, but believes both to be vices and not amenable to good health. Having suffered fevers in his childhood, Mr. Reade is careful of his health.

     "He is, we believe, a man who would have won even Willa's grandmother's approval."

     Aunt Emma's recommendation of Owen Reade ended on that strange note, which might have been read as caustic, given the family history.

     A short time later Willa received a formal letter from Owen Reade posted in San Francisco, asking her kind permission to visit on his way to his family home in the East. His letters were brief, correct.

     Mama, caught between conflicting loyalties, became querulous. She could deny her friend nothing. Still, it would have occurred to her that it could be happening again—the caller, the sudden leavetaking, the absence forever. Emma had left her, and now Willa might choose to leave. And with someone Grandmother would have approved of. It was too much for Mama to grasp, too much to try to sort out. All she knew for sure was that she could never comprehend why anyone would want to leave the farm. And yet her mother had not been happy there and Willa . . . Willa was as much an enigma to Mama as Mama had been to Grandmother.

     Grandmother had longed for the old life; she had wanted nothing so much as to go back to Virginia. For Willa, it was
Ultima thule
—West, she would say to me, arms flung out,
to the farthest point
. . . West to the light, to build the kind of life where anything, everything was possible.

     They were three generations of women, each caught in a web of place the others could neither see nor comprehend.

It was an amazing time, that week in the spring of 1887. The house was filled with an altogether new feeling of expectation—
of what, none of us were quite sure. It was enough that the patterns of our days changed, that the long sameness was broken. We were all affected, even sweet-mannered little Servia, the smallest of the boys, who walked around with a perplexed look on his face. We knew the purpose of Owen Reade's visit, though of course no one mentioned it.

     The older boys accepted Owen easily. They were anxious to ask him all about his travels in the West and he told them what they wanted to know. He tended to be self-deprecating, and he laughed at his own mistakes with ease. "Once," he said, "a small band of us were riding south of the Gila River in the Arizona territory, and we'd been told we could find shelter for a night at the home of a Señor Lopez. Well, we found the house all right—the hacienda, as they call it—and I saw a dark-skinned man and called out to him, in as good Spanish as I could muster, '
Señor Lopez, buenas dias!
' And this fellow calls back, 'The name's Gilligan, friend, and I'm from Baltimore.'"

     He was the kind of man who could be at ease anywhere. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to enter into the rhythm of a place, to become part of it, even when he was not actively a part.

     Bernie organized a footrace to be run on the course we had cut in the near pasture. Owen volunteered to check distances and call times, he was so much in the middle of things that we scarcely noticed he chose not to run. When Bernie beat Willa, decisively this time, and none of us seemed to know quite how we felt about it, it was Owen who said exactly the right thing. "Every champion," he announced in sonorous tones, "must make way for new, younger talent. There is always, must always be, the challenge."

     We all cheered and clapped and the Big Boys raised Willa to their shoulders and carried her around the running path. Willa waved her hat and made a fine, funny speech, after which Owen presented her with a bouquet of flowers which the Little Boys had hastily picked—roses and honeysuckle and flags—and we went to our beds that night feeling full and fine with ourselves.

     Something was happening and Owen was in the center of it all, moving, making the movement. Owen set the pace, he knew what he had to do and how long it was going to take. Time was his only limitation. He could not tolerate diversions and there was no place for mistakes because mistakes cost time. (Calculated risks, perhaps; when time was the critical factor, one would need to take calculated risks.)

     Owen created his own impetus. You could not be with him and fail to feel the energy—which was not physical, though he moved more briskly than others. It was deeper, more subtle. He had an aura that seemed always to say
something important is about to happen.
When this aura was coupled with Willa's energy, which was prodigious, the air fairly crackled; her yearnings were whetted by Owen's sense of the possible.