The Last Letter (45 page)

“You’ve been reading your Shakespeare? I don’t recall commiserating over literature.”

“I do.”

“Well, then. Good. I thank you for your time.”

Templeton dropped his hand and stepped back from Jeanie, turning to the bushes. The sound of a wagon coming over the land startled Jeanie and Templeton. They both turned, hands shielding the sun from their eyes.

Frank. There he was. Back on the plains.

Jeanie whimpered and reached for her neck, for the first time in a long time, searching for those missing pearls.

“Well, well, well,” Frank said. He leapt down from the wagon and spun Jeanie around. She stiffened in his arms, nausea filling her. Templeton looked away from them both, Jeanie thought she saw a tear glimmer in the corner of his eyes. “My wife and good friend, out berry picking. Looks like my arrival isn’t a moment too soon. I hope you weren’t attempting to cheer Jeanie’s dull feelings away.” He set Jeanie down.

Jeanie scowled. “Not at all. We were simply engaging in your favorite practice—contemplating the beauties of nature—this early batch of berries is quite the prairie miracle isn’t it darling husband?”

“Well, I’m back and I thank Templeton for looking in on you.”

“It was nothing,” Templeton said. He stuck his hand out to Frank. They both smiled at one another, as though they’d just put the order of the world back together again. Never in Jeanie’s life had she felt so insignificant. Not when she’d been left out of decision making once they lost their money in Des Moines, not when she’d sold her belongings to Elizabeth, or when she realized her family name was now linked to scandal forever.

Now, watching Frank assert his power over her, their lives, as though he was God himself, Jeanie felt blackness shut her away, realizing she’d never be happy again. Thomas Jefferson. Jeanie thought. She’d never have guessed the depths of unhappiness that was possible when she first heard of Jefferson’s idea that happiness lived in the pursuit of it, not in the achievement thereof.

“Mrs. Arthur. If you’ll take baby Yale out of the wagon,” Templeton said, dipping his hat, “I’ll be sure to let Katherine and Tommy know their father has returned. Frank. Is. Back.”

“You do that!” Frank said. A grin swallowed up his face, as though he wasn’t cognizant of the entire year’s worth of sad events.

Jeanie lifted Yale from the wagon without the baby making a stir in the least. She waited for Frank to ask to see Yale, the baby he would have thought was his with Jeanie, but he never did.

She hooked the two half-filled berry buckets in the crook of one arm and headed to the wagon where she waited for Frank to greet Katherine and Tommy. In the wagon seat she was rigid with anger, catatonic with paralyzing rage that Frank would return, acting as though he loved her when she knew for sure he’d planned to return and reunite with Ruthie. He must not have stopped there to find her missing yet. But why would he come to Jeanie first?

Jeanie didn’t know how to play this hand so she didn’t. She sat silently, feeling a fresh wash of pain splash over her spirit, drenching her with the same bluish-blackness that Frank seemed to have battled his entire life. And she pulled Yale closer to her chest, feeling comfort in the baby that was not of her flesh one bit.

Two weeks passed, then three. Jeanie had tried to get along with Frank, but she couldn’t bear the sight of him. He grew increasingly irritated as the time passed. Had Jeanie not known the secret he shared with Ruthie, she might have just supposed it was his ordinary mood swing. But she knew what it was. His loss of Ruthie, his one true love.

“Frank, I need some water. The kids didn’t even wash up this morning and they’re going to get sick from filth.” Jeanie said at the stove.

“Well, I can’t get it.” He rolled over in bed, facing the wall.

“You know what Frank? You have a family to support. You love strutting your maleness all over the prairie when it suits you, when you want to lay your claim over me, yet you do none of the work associated with the claim. If you’re my master, then do your end of the work, my king.”

Frank flew from the bed, his eyes circling in their sockets. “I can’t help it Jeanie. There’s nothing I can do that pleases you. I’m never good enough, fast enough, smart enough, follow-through enough. You are impossible to please.”

“Oh, so that’s it? That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why you selected Ruthie of all people.”

“I’m having a hard enough time.”

“Hard enough time with what?”

“Nothing.”

“Could it be that you selected Ruthie because she was so much less than me and thereby you could be her king? She would forever be indebted to the mesmerizing Frank G. Arthur and therefore sing your praises and yank your, your…“ Jeanie flung her hand in the direction of Frank’s crotch.

“You can’t even say the word and you certainly wouldn’t suck on it either. Ruthie understood everything there is to know about a man, how to be a woman, how to chase away my dull feelings, to allow her man the room to take care of her. You have no idea how to be a woman. She was nothing compared to you in many ways, but in other ways she was
everything
compared to you.”

Frank curled up and began to weep, his body jerking with sobs he never cried for James.

Jeanie stalked over to the bed, hands on hips, screaming at him. “You never cried for the son you lost, the one whose death you caused! And, your womanizing and opium eating!
You’re
the reason our son is gone forever, yet you never cried for that. It’s the loss of precious, ugly Ruthie that brings you to tears? You are Satan!”

Frank rolled over and sat up. “You don’t even believe in God, never mind Satan himself.”

“Yet. Here. He. Lies.” Jeanie threw her hand in his direction with each word.

“You can’t live without me. Like it or not.”

“You watch me.” Jeanie felt as though she was melting inside, as though she wasn’t sure she should say the words because she wouldn’t take them back once they were out there flying around.

“You think you’d be better off without me? The children, too?”

Jeanie swallowed, her throat swelling around the word. She thought she shouldn’t say it because she wasn’t so sure the world would let her be better off if she let Frank go.

“Yes.”

“Well, then I’m out of here. I’ll stop in Yankton before heading to Seattle, and file papers. You can sign them there at your leisure. This marriage is over, Jeanie Arthur. You now, officially, have nothing. You are nothing. Just like me.”

Frank left the dugout, yanking his coat from the first carved chair he’d made when they arrived, overturning it. Without a glance back he swiped his hat from a peg and strode to the wagon. Jeanie shuddered, the iron weight of what she’d just done crushing her. She felt panic swell and ran out of the dugout. She watched him head to the ramshackle barn, looking for his tell-tale sign that he wasn’t sure of his actions—the way he tapped his leg when he was nervous. But it wasn’t there, nothing. He was sure of his decision to leave, he had just needed Jeanie’s guts to make it happen. Like everything else in their lives, she had to make it happen or it didn’t.

“Mama?” Katherine and Templeton came over the side of the hill.

Jeanie wiped her eyes and righted her breathing. “Yes, Katherine, Mr. Templeton. I uh, I’m just making a little…tea, I’m having tea. Would you like some?”

Katherine shook her head, eyes vacant of expression. Jeanie didn’t know if they heard the argument. What could they know?

“Katherine what is it?”

“Father left. He just said you divorced him. That you chose pride over your family. Over us. That we could now count our address as six Hell’s half-acre. All because he wasn’t good enough for you, that he could never be what you wanted him to be.”

Jeanie covered her mouth. “He is mistaken. He doesn’t…“

“Mama, you didn’t send him away. Did you? He says we won’t survive.”

Jeanie walked toward the dugout, headed to the cook-stove and busied herself preparing tea.

Katherine stood beside her, Templeton inside the door. “I didn’t do anything wrong, Katherine. I’m preserving our family, not destroying it.”

“If you made Father leave, allowed him to divorce you, then it was you. All you. You can’t support us. Even with the Zurchenko’s help. They can’t keep giving us stuff.”

“I thought you were a women’s rights devotee, my darling Katherine. We’ll live in Yankton. I can write, sew, do whatever it takes, but we won’t suffer because your father left. You were right what you said that day of the storm. I’ve been doing it all along as it is.”

“You’ve lost your mind, Mother, just like the Hunts said, you’ve crossed the line from grieving mother to insane.”

Jeanie spun around. “Is
that
what the Hunts said? The drug addicted minister and her family who fled when things got tough? Those Hunts? Well, let’s just say their opinion counts for nothing in this house.”

“Well, mine isn’t nothing and we can’t do this, Mama, I want to stay here and we need Father. I’m going to get him. I am!” Katherine flew from the dugout, leapt into Templeton’s wagon and tore into the horizon.

“Well, it appears I have nothing, Templeton, and now my daughter stole your wagon, so how about some tea?”

Templeton’s face dragged about down to his boots. He sat in the rocker and Jeanie handed him a cup of tea. He sipped it, not speaking.

“I have to leave the prairie, Jeanie. Just for five months or so.”

Jeanie felt a stab in her chest. She hadn’t realized how much she’d built a dependency on the idea that Templeton would be around to help her with her husbandless family—her very own air castle.

“My mother is ill, my brother and father, too,” Templeton said, “I’m stopping in Yankton first for provisions, and then I’m going to Boston to help my family.”

Jeanie straightened in her chair, suddenly finding the backbone that had been hers for most of her life. “Do you love me, Mr. Templeton?”

“Yes.”

“Then stay.”

“I have to go to my family. It’ll only be for five months, I will return as soon—”

“Don’t bother.” Jeanie stood and crossed her arms over her chest.

Templeton stood, his gaze barely meeting Jeanie’s.

Jeanie shook her finger at him. “You see, you simply adored the opportunity to dream of me as your love. The reality of me as your love is not so precious is it?”

“That’s not it.”

“Yes, well, we both know it is. So go on. I’ll have Katherine drop the wagon over your way and have a good trip. Good thoughts and luck to your loved ones.”

“I’m coming back.” Templeton stood and yanked Jeanie into his body, smashing the air out of her.
“I’m coming back for you.”

Jeanie sniffled in his arms, letting the smell of him sit with her one last time.

He let her go, his eyes filled with the tears she’d thought she’d seen a few weeks earlier.

Jeanie smoothed back her hair then her skirts. “Well, go on.”

“I love you. You are in my heart.”

“Well, I’m tired. I have no room inside my heart for you. There was a time when my weary heart would have liked to rest on the love you claim to want to give me. But now, it’s full of ugliness and in the little loving spot that’s left, there is vacancy only for my children. You are with me, I won’t deny that, but I hold you outside my heart. And that is no place for love to grow.”

“I don’t believe it. It’s just circumstances.”

“Isn’t it always.”

Templeton shook his head.

“Go on,” Jeanie said raising her chin toward the door. She silently begged him to stay. She knew if he left he’d never return. She could never risk leaving for a man who wouldn’t stay for her. Not after what she’d learned from being married to Frank.

Jeanie didn’t move, wanting with all her being for him to stay, to give her a plan of action, to show he wanted her for real, that a divorce meant nothing to him, that he loved her in a way that mattered, the kind that meant follow-through and support, the kind that would be there sixty years later. But she wouldn’t beg him, tell him what to say or how to say it, what to do or how to show that he meant what he said.

Templeton backed out of the dugout, his eyes finally smiling a bit, finally his mouth lifted in that way that charmed her so much a year before. “I’ll be back.”

“I dare you.”

And finally Templeton did disappear. Jeanie fought the urge to rush out the door and chase him, yell for him, fall to his feet, begging for his love. She would never do that again. She did, however crumble to the floor, wracked with renewed loss, wondering what she’d done in life to deserve so much pain in such a short amount of time.