In Need of a Good Wife (10 page)

Affectionately,
Mary Rousseau

. . .

Dear Miss Rousseau,
Am I speaking Greek? I requested a blond wife, and you are
not she. I am starting to wonder how so many of you can be so
dim-witted.

—Drake

Dear Lonesome Winters,
Have my letters not convinced you by now, Miss, to tell me
your true given name? For I should very much like to know it.
How can we speak truly of our feelings when you are to me a
mystery still?

In faith, I shall wait for you here.

Nit LeBlanc,
Hand
Schreier Farm

Mayor Randall Cartwright wrapped the wool muffler around his face and neck, then took up the empty crate and tramped through the snow to the woodpile stacked against his uncle’s sod house. The wind cut through every worn patch of his clothes and his eyes stung. His left-hand glove had developed a hole in the join between the thumb and index finger. The tender web of skin there was chapped and peeling, as if it had been burned. But it was only the effect of the unrelenting cold.

Back inside he pushed the door closed and shoved it into the jamb with his shoulder. Randall’s dog, Sergeant, woofed from his burrow under a pile of moth-eaten horse blankets.

“Must be nice,” Randall said. Sergeant pulled his head back into the warm cocoon so that only his snout was visible, but when he heard Randall tearing a piece of salt pork into bits and placing it in a bowl, he snapped to attention. When the dog had shown up on the front step last year, one of his ears was missing. The fur had grown over the scar where one eye used to be, and he held his right front paw curled up to his chest. The paw eventually healed enough to walk on, but Sergeant limped like a man with a peg leg. He shambled over to his place under the table.

The banked coals woke up and blazed flames up the wood in the stove. A. J. Baumann charged a hefty price for a cord of firewood in his store, since it had to come all the way from eastern Iowa by train, but it was worth every penny on these cold January mornings. It wouldn’t take long for the room to heat and the melting icicles to stream down the walls and form puddles on the floor.

Randall’s uncle Lambert Kellinger built the soddy when he first came to Destination on his own, about ten years back, with the help of Leo Schreier and some hired men. They plowed an acre of buffalo grass, then cut the sod into strips with spades and stacked them like bricks in alternating lengthwise and crosswise rows. The soddy was bigger than some, with a small sleeping alcove separated by a curtain, and two doors, one off the kitchen and the other off what Uncle Kellinger called the “front room,” the house’s sad excuse for a parlor. Randall slept there on the sofa each night, his long legs hanging over the arm, the blood draining out of them until they were numb. In order to turn from one side to another, he had to sit up and shift himself back against the cushions. His shoulders were too wide to roll and he risked falling off with a heavy thud. It was uncomfortable, but it was better than sleeping on the cold dirt floor.

At the small table Randall cracked the skin of ice on the milk and poured some into a shallow pan. He tried slicing the stale hunk of bread on the board but it was as hard and dry as a brick, so he broke it in half and swept the crumbs into two bowls. When the milk steamed, he poured it over the bread. He heard Uncle Kellinger swear and cast off his blankets.

“Took you damn long enough to get the fire going this morning,” he said as he threw himself down in his chair in disgust. He yanked one of the bowls toward him and milk sloshed over the side.

Randall nodded. He knew better than to respond to the old grouch, to tell him that the fire was up at the very same time it had been the day before, and the day before that. Uncle Kellinger took pride in the fact that he was a caustic son of a bitch. Anyone who tried to get in the way of that was a fool.

“That dog should be out in the barn.”

This too was a familiar exchange. “Uncle, it’s too cold at night for him to stay out there without a fire. Would you have me spend double on wood to keep the barn stove going at night?”

Uncle Kellinger grunted.

Randall took the last bite of soggy bread, then tipped the bowl against his face and drank the last of the milk. He wiped his hand over his beard where some of it had dripped. “Well, I’ve got work to do out in the barn.”

He stood up and put his gloves back on, thinking to himself that he would need to stop in at Baumann’s later in the day to get some salve for his hand, then pulled his wool hat down over his ears and wrapped the muffler across his face.

“Work,” Uncle Kellinger snorted. He sat back in the chair in his thin nightshirt, untied at the neck. His wool socks were pulled up to the knees, like a woman’s stockings.

At the threshold, Sergeant hesitated when he saw the depth of the snow and whined a little, looking up at Randall.

“Let’s go,” Randall said in a low voice. “Unless you’d like to stay here with him.”

On the way out to the barn, Randall tucked another load of wood under his arm. The wind lashed at the tender skin of his neck beneath his beard. His nose was running and he wiped it on the back of his glove before the snot could freeze in his mustache. Inside, he dumped the wood in the crude stove he had fashioned out of a big kettle the brewery had discarded and a long, bent pipe that did little to redirect the smoke outside. It was enough, though, to warm the room while he worked over the winter and to keep him from going crazy from being cooped up in the house with his uncle.

It soothed Randall’s nerves to see his tools laid out in two rows on the table where he had left them the day before. His latest project was a kind of automatic broom that could be used to sweep a carpet. He had taken a cylinder of wood and affixed the bristles from four hairbrushes to its surface, then built a lightweight box around it, just big enough so that the cylinder could spin. When he pushed the broom over a piece of fabric covered with a few pieces of broken hay, the bristles collected the hay and the box kept them from spilling back out again. With a pole attached to the top of the box, he could stand up and push it along the ground. There was no need for a dustpan. This invention—which he had yet to quite accomplish, for the box leaked and the bristles quickly became clotted with debris—was a useless success, since no citizen in town owned a carpet, and Randall had little hope of getting a prototype to Chicago or St. Louis and finding someone willing to manufacture it. But he didn’t let matters of practicality deter him. Randall loved the puzzle of the thing, the possibility of solving a niggling problem in a novel way. He loved the prospect that he might be of use.

For what was a man if he couldn’t be of use? Randall felt that if anything mattered in this world,
duty
must matter. He had tried to be dutiful, even as a young man in St. Louis, when, as his parents’ only child, he cared for his mother through her long illness and slow death. After she was gone, he cast about for a summer, drinking great quantities of ale with his friends and roaming the lanes by the river looking for girls. The powdered décolletage, the cloying perfume that came from New Orleans—it just about drove him into a mania. He reveled in its hold over him but feared it too, and he was forever grateful when one evening his father grabbed him by the back of his collar just as he was about to walk out the door once again and sat him down in a chair. Randall would find something useful to do, his father said, or the old man would cut him off.

So Randall wrote to Cyrus McCormick in Chicago, who had developed a reaping machine that promised to change the practice of farming forever, though some farmers were still skeptical. Randall explained that he was good with his hands. He could solve problems. He would work hard and he didn’t expect much pay if McCormick would take him on as a kind of apprentice. He never received a reply to the letter, and later it occurred to him that McCormick probably received dozens of letters like his each week. Eventually Randall found work at the levee in St. Louis, unloading ships, and he spent fifteen years there. He was satisfied at least that he had a place to go each day, honest pay at the end of the week. He was bad at saving money, though, and barely kept his head above water. His father died; the ale-drinking friends moved away or married or died too. St. Louis, the city in which he had lived his whole life, began to seem like a foreign place.

Then the war of rebellion came, and if ever there was a clear path to duty, this was it. Randall was agnostic on the politics. Slavery was, unquestionably, an abomination, and Lincoln was a leader for the ages to be sure—Randall grew his beard for the first time when he saw an image of the president’s noble profile. But there was a whiff of hypocrisy in the speeches of the stiff-backed abolitionist blowhards way up in Massachusetts. Randall doubted that, given the opportunity for the immense wealth and fertile land to which the Georgians had access, the Yankee farmers wouldn’t take it, and the free labor that came along with it, in a heartbeat.

But the cause of keeping the Union together was something Randall could get behind, and he heeded Lincoln’s call to sign up. He was shattered when the recruiting officer took a look at his birth certificate and shook his head. Randall was nearly forty by then and he realized that though he wanted very much to be of use, the United States of America might not have much use for him. He followed the news of each battle with a heavy dread in his gut, and he considered forging a new document but feared that the gray sprouts at his temples might give him away.

Restless, directionless, he drank himself into oblivion for the whole of December, then came down with a fever that nearly killed him. When the spring came, Randall was desperate enough to leave St. Louis for good. He was driven to write his mother’s rancid-hearted brother to ask him whether there was a way he might be of use in Destination, Nebraska.

Around noon Randall’s stomach was growling, but he dreaded going back inside. He decided to go into town instead, stopping at Baumann’s store for the salve and then going to the tavern for dinner. Uncle Kellinger lent his horses to Leo Schreier over the winter, since that man seemed to have a use for them and a warmer barn that would keep them from freezing to death. Since November, Randall had been making the half-mile walk into town on snowshoes. He pulled a small sled behind him for the provisions he would bring back; when no one was looking, he let Sergeant ride on it. The snow was deeper than the dog was tall, and it made for slow going. What Sergeant really needed was his own set of snowshoes—an idea that set Randall to thinking for most of the cold walk.

Baumann had shoveled out a path to the entrance, a poorly hung door that slapped closed behind him on a spring. Two thick blankets had been tacked to the door frame to keep out the wind. Randall pushed them aside and stepped into the store. Sergeant shook the snow off his back and trotted toward the hissing stove in back.

“Afternoon, Cartwright.”

“Is it?” Randall said. “The sky’s so dark all damn day, it’s hard to tell.”

“It’s enough to drive a man insane,” Baumann said.

The store was sparsely stocked this time of year. All business pretty much shut down from November to April, except for the absolute essentials. By October, anyone with half a brain had put up all the food he would need: vegetables preserved by Omaha housewives, sacks of barley and flour and beans, dried meat. Eggs and butter could be had on barter, and the occasional chicken. The butcher, Gibson, had yet to slaughter the handful of animals ready for it. No one knew what was taking him so long. Some of the men hunted rabbits and even prairie dogs, but Randall never had taken to the ropy meat. Baumann said he stayed open to sharpen tools and sell firewood, but mainly he just needed the company.

“You got anything that can help me with this?” Randall asked, gingerly pulling off the glove and showing Baumann his raw hand.

“This is all I’ve got.” Baumann pulled a tin out of a drawer behind the counter. “It works if you can stand the smell.”

“Hm.” Randall opened it and lifted the container of goo to his nose. It smelled like lard and beeswax. “I’ll try anything.”

“You should bandage it too,” Baumann said, handing him a length of cotton. “It looks pretty bad.”

Randall scooped a bit of the salve out with his index finger and spread it on his hand, then wrapped the bandage tightly around his palm. He squeezed his fingers into a fist. “Have you had your dinner yet?”

Baumann patted his stomach. “Shepherd’s pie today, heavy on the potatoes. Mrs. Healy is worth her weight in gold, and then some. I hope spring will bring a few more like her.”

Randall grinned, though he felt like cringing. “We’ll see, won’t we?” He paid for the salve and whistled for Sergeant. The dog reluctantly left his warm place by the stove. “I thank you, sir.”