In Need of a Good Wife (18 page)

“Don’t worry,” Deborah said when she saw Clara give Molly a worried look. “She’s snoring. I can hear her.”

But when they arrived in Des Moines, the train a black snake slinking through the darkness, Molly didn’t wake up.

Of course, it was terribly sad that Miss Zalinski had died. Rowena wasn’t arguing otherwise. But what sort of foolish girl would undertake a journey of this length knowing she was ill? She had put them all at risk, the way they were traveling together in such close quarters. Now the brides would all worry over every little sniffle and cough. Miss Bixby should have done something to stop it, Rowena thought, but alas, she did not. They were delayed two days in Des Moines making arrangements for the girl’s body to be transported east. Rowena overheard Clara telling Elsa that she was forced to spend much of her remaining funds on their board and on the return fare for Molly. The girl’s family was poor and could barely afford to send her father to meet the train in Chicago and bring her body back to New York.

Rowena stood very still just outside the door to the kitchen at the inn so that she could continue to eavesdrop. Clara, it seemed, had agonized about whether to write to the mayor and deliver the bad news, both about Molly and about the fact that she would be delivering far fewer women than promised. She worried all through the night about what would happen when the men learned that some of them would not have wives after all—and that most of their money had been spent. In the end Clara decided not to write ahead. The news wouldn’t reach the men much faster than the women would. They would learn of their misfortune soon enough.

Deborah Peale cried through all six hours of the bone- rattling trip by coach from Des Moines to Council Bluffs. She rested her cheek on Miss Bixby’s shoulder. The rest of them were quiet, chastened by what they had seen but determined to move forward. Rowena certainly felt determined. Nothing was going to stand in the way of her marriage to Daniel Gibson.

When the coach finally slowed as it approached the Missouri River, the women pressed close to the windows on either side to get a good view—they had seen very little water since Chicago. Both banks were thick with trees that grew right down to the water’s edge. The river was low after a dry spring, and the water splashed against a rim of rocks, lacy with weeds and moss.

The coach stopped at a small depot. Passengers continuing west would board the Lone Tree Ferry across the river to Omaha, then file onto another train. From a distance, the river had seemed like an inconsequential ribbon unspooling across the landscape, but from the slow-moving boat it was as wide as a lake, a lake on the move, hightailing it southeast to St. Louis even as they moved west across its belly.

Omaha was nothing more than a grid of several streets and a few dozen identical wood-framed buildings, plenty of horses and wagons, and a smattering of soddy houses on the outer ring of town. Manhattan City had layers of history: an inner core with buildings older than the Republic, dotted and encircled by additions from each new architectural trend. Lanes wound circuitously around ancient trees and ponds and cemeteries; as the city grew, improvements were made to the existing framework, but the original was never usurped, only augmented, like a new layer of shingles hammered over the old. Here in eastern Nebraska was a town built all at once where, ten years before, there had been nothing. It had a sane feeling of absolute utility. It was unencumbered by the past and its mistakes, by sentimentality, by the daunting task of living up to some great man who had lived in your grandfather’s time. It was clean and new and simple and yet seemed to be missing something at its core. It didn’t yet have a story.

Within minutes they were chugging west and leaving Omaha behind. The land, of course, was as old as any other land, and it seemed to gaze warily back at the people driving railroad spikes into its back. The Union Pacific line followed the westbound course of the Platte River, a tributary of the Missouri, its banks shadowed by cottonwood trees, vines, and shrubs. Treeless land stretched north and south of the river, as flat as a planed board and feathered by impossibly tall buffalo grass. Every ten miles or so they passed a town, if you could call it that, two or three buildings leaning up against each other in the wind. After three hours the train finally slowed to a stop next to a depot with a painted sign that read
Destination
.

At least half the town seemed to have turned out to welcome Bixby’s Belles from Manhattan City. The men stood in clusters of three or four, some with their arms crossed, some with their hands in their pockets, shifting from side to side and spitting intermittent arcs of tobacco juice into the dirt. Most needed a haircut and a shave. At first they tried, as men will, to hide their desire to see the women on the other side of the train car windows. But a few couldn’t keep from cheering as the engineer hopped down to open the door to the car, unfolding the stairs to the platform.

Rowena stood and touched the back of her bonnet to be sure it was firmly in place. Miss Bixby stepped down first and greeted the men in the front of the crowd, and then Rowena, Elsa, Kathleen, Anna, and Deborah filed out. The six of them blinked in the brilliant sunlight. Eight days ago they had left Manhattan City with crisp ribbons and white gloves; now they were filthy and exhausted from the journey, their dresses rumpled, their cheeks pale. Only Rowena had taken the time to change into a fresh dress and splash water on her face from the fire bucket outside the engine car.

A strange quiet fell over the crowd, especially the eight waiting bachelors as their eyes moved over the arrivals and they wondered whether they might, on sight alone, be able to recognize the woman they had been corresponding with for months. They were so eager for these women it was palpable in the air, thrilling and a little ominous too. But then a few men seemed to realize something was wrong.

They glanced into the train car. “Where’s the rest of them?” someone murmured. They glanced at each other, then at Miss Bixby, waiting for an explanation. Perhaps the rest of the women would come out of the train in a minute, or on another train in a day or two? A shipment of supplies from Chicago had come in along with them, and a pair of enormous railroad men were unloading the crates of nails, door hinges, and carpentry tools, as well as a giant spool of chicken wire, onto a wagon to haul it over to the general store. The scraping and clanking of their work, and the huffing of the idle train, were the only sounds anyone heard for a few long moments.

Anna Ludlow was the first to step forward when she saw the reverend in his black garb. Miss Bixby glanced at the cluster of papers she held in her hand. They flapped and curled over her fingers in the wind. “Reverend Crowley, allow me to introduce Miss Ludlow.” The reverend was a tall man and seemed to stoop a little at the shoulders as a gesture of good faith to all the shorter men who stood nearby. He took Anna’s gloved hand and she made a shade above her eyes with the other. They grinned at each other like schoolchildren, despite the fact that they were both well over thirty years old.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Anna said, her face full of relief.

Reverend Crowley nodded. “Like meeting an old friend.”

Nit LeBlanc, Molly’s intended, stood off to the side holding his hat and looking confused. Rowena knew it was him from the large goiter that hung beneath his chin. He had told Molly about it in a letter so that she wouldn’t be shocked when she saw him, but Molly was undeterred. “I simply shall not gaze upon it,” she had written back, so proud of the dignity in that sentence that she had repeated it to Rowena on the train. Miss Bixby noticed him too, and Rowena could see the dread cross her face when she prepared to tell him the news about poor Molly.

Amos Riddle had not taken the time to bathe before driving his wagon the five miles from his homestead to meet his bride. Rowena watched the expression on Kathleen’s face shift like a cloud changing shape in two competing currents. He looked very little like the man in the tintype Kathleen had held on the train—“He said he wanted to send it so I would know what I was in for,” Kathleen told her. But now the Irish bride had to look past the dirt on his face and hands, the sweat-stiffened lock of hair that fell over his brow, and discern whether beneath it all he might still be just a little bit handsome. She bit down on her lip, determined, Rowena could see, to be hopeful. Meanwhile, Mr. Riddle looked her over as one examines a horse. Rowena was so caught up in watching the two of them appraise each other that she did not hear Miss Bixby call out her own name and Mr. Gibson’s. It wasn’t until he stepped close enough to her to cast a shadow on her face that she turned.

“Oh,” was the first word she said to her soon-to-be husband.

Daniel seemed momentarily stunned. He had seen her likeness and Rowena understood from his look of surprise that he had prepared himself to greet a young woman with some kind of deformity that lurked outside the edges of the frame. She was beautiful, yes, but it was probable that she had a lame leg, an incongruously fat set of hips, a revolting growth on the back of her head—something, anything, that could explain why such a beautiful woman would have agreed to come here, to marry
him
, sight unseen. Feeling a little amused by this, Rowena twirled and curtseyed with a flourish so he could see that she was hiding nothing. Her small frame was perfectly proportioned, her bust smooth and high with the help of her French corset. She could have sold it back to the dressmaker when her finances contracted and gotten enough money to feed herself for several more months, but she had felt that one couldn’t put too high a value on the right foundational garment. Rowena saw instantly that she had been correct to do this. The urge to draw near to the female silhouette resided deep in the ancient center of a man and she had ignited it now in Daniel, not to mention several other of the nearby grooms who gazed jealously on. Rowena felt for a moment like Helen of Troy, capable of setting the entire prairie ablaze. She was a little wild with power.

“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Gibson,” she said, never breaking eye contact with him.

He shook his head. “Believe me—the pleasure is all mine.” He put out his elbow and she took it. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, Rowena thought, not that it mattered in the least to the question of whether she would marry him. She felt sure she would have wed a goblin if he had money. He was not as tall as Richard but, still, of decent height, and he wore a wellmade suit and hat. As they moved away from the crowd she nosed something slightly off-putting wafting from his dark hair, a rancid smell, like tallow.

“A few of us fellows were overeager to see you ladies, I’m afraid, and we’ve got a minister waiting inside the depot,” Daniel said. The thick rope of his mustache turned up on the ends and wiggled above his lip as he talked. “What do you say, my dear?”

Her hackles raised at the endearment. The only men who called Rowena
my dear
were her father and Richard, and it took her a moment to remember that she probably wouldn’t be hearing it from either of them ever again. She tried to consider Daniel’s question with a clear head. Kathleen had explained that she would be heading on to the land office in Fremont to put in her claim for acreage adjacent to Amos’s land. By law, they would have to wait three months to marry before the land could be combined. But Rowena had no interest in land and supposed she really had no reason to wait. “Mr. Gibson,” she said, sidestepping the question. “You spoke of your business interests and clients in your letters, but despite my queries, you’ve never said precisely what it is you do for a living.”

He chewed his lip for a moment, opened his mouth, then hesitated. “I’m the butcher,” he said finally, pointing at the shop at the end of the lane with a cow painted on its sign. “I know I should have told you.”

Rowena thought back on his enigmatic letters, in which he spoke of great ambition and certainty his business would grow now that products could travel by train to and from Chicago with ease. The way he avoided specifics made her suppose he was a trader of some kind, perhaps involved in something not quite legal that paid handsomely for the risk. But the assumptions had been hers. She saw now that she should have pressed harder, but in truth Rowena had wanted to believe he was what she imagined. She had been staking her entire future on it.

“It’s all right,” she said, straightening her back. “It’s an honest living.”

Relief washed over Daniel’s face and he held out his hand. “Come on—let’s go inside.”

Rowena walked beside him into the depot, her chin trembling. She would get used to it, the blood-meat smell of him. She would simply get used to it.

Elsa was the last woman to step down from the train car. After she did so, two large men carried the trunks from the train to a spot under the overhang. Miss Bixby moved among the new couples, checking names off her list. Elsa could see that the woman was once again in pain from her headaches. She touched her fingers to her temples as two men spoke roughly to her near the entrance to the depot.

Because Mr. Schreier had not expressed interest in Elsa’s appearance, she had not included a likeness of herself in the letter she sent him back in the fall. Neither had he sent one of himself, and as Elsa stood alone next to her trunk under the overhang, she realized that she had no idea who he might be. Fifteen minutes passed. She watched as the crowd thinned. It was a clear, warm day, and the wind skimmed over the land. The horses stood patiently waiting for their masters to return, their manes whipping in the air.

Elsa was seized suddenly by a terrible thought: What if Mr. Schreier did not come? What if something had happened to him in the time that passed between their letters and this journey? Surely someone would have written to Miss Bixby to alert her that Elsa should stay in New York, wouldn’t they? Elsa closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind. She was here and she would have to find a way to make the best of it.
I am
in the palm of his hand.