Glenway Wescott

“ She was a married woman now, and her marriage was like a return from childhood of the father she could scarcely remember. He too had been kind. But she was tired of Missouri, tired and terrified. She had heard of a man named Cleaver who was starting north in a few days with a team and overland wagon; if only the doctor had loved Wisconsin as she did. . . . But he had never been there. So she would have to stay always on the frontier between the North and the South, with a war breaking out between the two. She dreamed of the war, the lifting of row on row of mournful trumpets, far away. ”

“ Mary had never been kissed by a young man, but his breath was musty with drink.
He let her walk back alone in the dusk. There was a moist place on both her sleeves above the elbow—the axle grease from his hands. Without wanting to die, she wished that she were dead; but even the journey north would come to an end.
She said to the women who were making up a bed for her (the first of many) : "I am going north. I have money." They pitied her less, and anger was added to their anxiety. She said, "I will pay you," and they were ashamed. She fell asleep, finding it very strange to sleep alone. ”

“ Eliza was eager to escape from a State peopled in her imagination with wild girls bearing switches. Mary was glad to go, welcoming all the years of the rest of her life as if they were people about to become friends. ”

“ All winter the neighbors brought stove wood, sacks of potatoes, and hams, tallow dips and corn meal, and eggs in hand-woven baskets. On the bed, Eliza closed her eyes while her mother complained of unruly girls and what they deserved. Mary did all the work cheerfully.
The widow Harris talked of her relatives in Missouri as if distance had cheated her of a resource to which she had a right. Some one suggested that they be sent south; ambitious men and women who begrudged the provisions, those with large families to support, and those who pitied them, welcomed the solution with equal relief. ”

“ She felt like a fugitive who finds the trace which he has left a moment before, which will betray him a moment after. How swiftly and quietly they would work if they came back and found her and a negro at the head and the foot of the bed, sitting quietly together. ”

“ State rights and the souls of the negroes were taken as a pretext for murderous appetites, and many slept with shotguns at the head of the bed.
The doctor said to Mary, "Better not be seen from the road with the blacks. All the old women will talk."
He was a Unionist. "Slavery doesn't matter," he said. "There'll always be slaves, whether we buy 'em or pay 'em wages. But a pack of desperadoes can rule round a post office; they don't get so far as Washington. So if the Union breaks up, we go to wrack and ruin." ”

“ The fanatical Unionists could not defend him because he was a complacent slaveholder, so that of all those whom the Rebels hated, he was the weakest as well as the least discreet. An old man, thinking only of politics and the battles in the East, he paid no attention to the echoes of war in Missouri, the drunkenness of war increasing around his house.
Tired by the anger of sick Rebels whom he continued to visit, the doctor went to bed early one night. In the same room Mary tried to read Pilgrim's Progress by the light of two candles, but her attention wandered. ”

“ There Alwyn and his little sister waited on a stone pile, and stared over the fence, over the shrubs and the monuments, at the nearly soundless funeral. The tall stranger and the great blue-gray box had come a thousand miles from a place called Oklahoma City; and Alwyn breathed heavily as the coffin, covered with bouquets, disappeared in the new grave, because the heroine of an old story had come back to the place where her travels had begun. ”

“ Her husband lay somewhere in a pile of damp gravel, and men were driving her slaves away, crying in the sunshine.
Mary thought: there is that man; there is that man who is going north. A man in an overland wagon, horses, horses galloping north—nobody else could help her. ”

“ Alwyn wanted them, but his mother said it would be too expensive to have them sent from the Far West. Mary Tower, born Harris, had been brave, energetic, and virtuous; and Alwyn's grandmother, who had not seen her for half a century, loved her still, and said she was "the greatest of the pioneer women." This adventurous life embodied not all the womanly qualities of the period, but all that his grandmother admired and meant to praise. ”

“ So Eliza and he were married. The preacher had to raise his voice above the sobs which the widow muffled in her sleeve; a few boxes and carry-alls were packed, and they said good-by.
Then the widow Harris died, leaving Mary alone. She was unhappy with her relatives. Her presence reminded them that they had no children; her dependence reminded them of their poverty; all the coming and going, and the widow's death, increased their longing to return to the East—they dreaded death in Missouri. They had nothing to say to Mary ”

“ Harris complained, and her health failed. A sallow young man with red eyelids who had come from her home in Vermont began to feel a dolorous excitement in Mary's presence, and finally proposed marriage. When she said No, he trembled with either anger or sadness, and turned his attentions to Eliza, dwelling on the disappointments of the West and wooing her with praise of the East. ”

“ Six months later her uncle and aunt returned to the town in the East where Eliza was living; and Mary was the last of her family on that frontier.
Dr. Brandon had a small plantation, six darkies, and innumerable patients. Mary was lonely. She played with the pickaninnies, washing them in the creek and spreading them out on the grass to dry, and with the doctor's help nursed all the sick slaves in the county. On some days she tried to learn their songs; on others she tried not to hear them. The Missouri women gossiped about the way she behaved. ”