The Guardian Part 3

We rested for a day, strolling. We crossed the bridge over to Kansas City, Kansas. The smell of the stockyards and packinghouses could turn one into a vegetarian.

I went into several p.a.w.nshops in both Missouri and Kansas, having my wedding ring appraised. One of the Missouri ones offered $250, fifty dollars more than anybody else, so I took it back there and sold it. I suppose it was worth twice as much, at least, but I was glad to be rid of it. The ruby necklace I had traded a tooth for brought another hundred.

The next day, we boarded the morning train to Topeka, where we picked up the branch to Dodge City.

Miles and miles of grain, and then desolate, untamed prairie from horizon to horizon. Daniel stared out the window for hours on end, ignoring the book in his lap. I let him be. He had probably expected something more interesting.

A few years before, Dodge City had been the epitome of the wild and wooly west. The town literally started as a saloon. Fort Dodge had been in place since 1865, an outpost that protected pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail. In 1872, a Canadian named George Hoover showed up with a wagonload of whiskey, knowing that liquor was not allowed within five miles of the fort. He measured out five miles down the trail, set up a tent, and made a bar out of a board and two stacks of sod. That became the town.

There's a popular radio show now,Gunsmoke, that purports to be about Dodge City in the early days, but it's far too wholesome. The town had two periods of prosperity. The first one was from 1872 to 1876, when the town was called Buffalo City, and was the West's main s.h.i.+pping point for buffalo hides and meat. Millions of the animals were killed by men who essentially sat in one place and shot them like fish in a barrel, until they were exterminated.

It was a very rough town then. Seventeen people were killed in shoot-outs the first year of its existence, most in the "no man's land" south of the railroad tracks. North of the tracks, even then, it was illegal to carry a gun.

Dodge might have died with the buffaloes if not for a legislative action that made it "Queen of the Cowtowns," a dubious distinction. Texas longhorns used to be driven every year to railheads in Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita-but it turned out the Texas cows were killing the Kansas ones. They carried a tick to which they were immune, but which caused a killing fever in the local cattle.

The Kansas legislature established a quarantine line that protected those three cities, and by default gifted Dodge with the annual visit of a quarter of a million tick-infested cattle. Along with the cows came cowboys, of course-and gunmen, card sharps, prost.i.tutes, and whoever else might make a dollar off these bored and tired and reckless men.

It only lasted ten years. In 1885, the quarantine was extended to include the whole state. Dodge had its own cattle by then, presumably immune to the tick disease-but the winter of '85/'86 was one long blizzard, which all but destroyed the industry.

When our train pulled into town nine years later, Dodge was still a cowtown without many cows. (I called the Chamber of Commerce in 1951, and they reluctantly admitted that the bovine population wa.s.still under the 1885 level.) But there were people, and the people had children, and the children needed teachers.

I had hoped to sit down with some frontier rustics and sweep them off their feet with my obvious education, and so be able to continue living under an a.s.sumed name and false background- but even in Dodge, that would not be possible. A schoolteacher had to establish her credentials. So I gave them my real name and they wired Wellesley for my bona fides.

I suspected then that it was only a matter of time before Edward would follow that trace back to Dodge.

As it turned out, he would be slow, and we would have more than four years of grace.

Almost sixty years later, I wonder what was in my head. When they asked for my credentials, I should have demurred and put Daniel back on the train, and traveled on, perhaps to Mexico or Central America. Anywhere the law could reach us, a lawyer could as well. For all his faults, Edward was a good lawyer.

And he was not a man to be bested by a woman.

None of that was in my mind when the train pulled away from the depot in Dodge, leaving us alone, tired, dusty, and baking under the Kansas summer sun. There was no one in charge at the depot, just an empty telegraph room, but there was a sign offering rooms for rent up on Central Avenue, with a simple map.

With no conveyances in sight, we hoisted our belted-together footlockers and headed up the hill.

It was a rooming house run by a Mrs. Clifton, who was a strange and unpleasant woman, suspicious and querulous. I took two rooms for a month because they were cheap, nine dollars apiece, and we were too tired to go off searching for another place. We had been on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for more than twenty-four hours, including an interminable wait in Hays City, and of course there were no sleepers.

I checked our beds for vermin and, finding nothing macroscopic, gratefully collapsed for all the afternoon and night.

In the morning we had a wholesome breakfast of grease and eggs on hard bread, and set out to explore.

Daniel wanted to see Boot Hill, where desperados slightly slow on the draw would wind up, but it wasn't there anymore-in fact, if we'd come four years earlier, I might have wound up teaching over those old graves. The bodies had been relocated to Prairie Grove in 1878, and a school-house was built on the lot.

But it burned down in '90, and was still charred rubble when we sought it out.

Daniel was not unprepared for the lack of excitement in Dodge; I'd told him about the sarcastic magazine article I'd read, describing how tame it was now. But still I think he was hoping against hope that some cowboy would come around the corner, all clinking spurs and creaking leather. It never happened. No cows, no cowboys, at least in town.

What did happen was a game of stickball near the ruins of the Boot Hill school. They said they could use another player, so Daniel got to work off some energy while I sat on a bench and contemplated our limited future.

There was no shade. Every tree in Dodge was one that had been brought from the East, transplanted and carefully nurtured. Few public areas had trees then-although an enterprising citizen had planted and cultivated an extensive vegetable garden along the railroad tracks, to demonstrate the land's potential fertility to people who might be lunatic enough to try farming.

I went back to Mrs. Clifton's to take a bath, and when Daniel came in he used the water after me (fairly turning it to mud). When night fell we lit kerosene lamps. There were electric lamps on the street, but the house was not wired-Mrs. Clifton thought electricity was dangerous, and she was probably right, at that time and place. Wooden houses like hers were dry tinderboxes.

The next day I went to the Third Ward School and found the princ.i.p.al, Leroy Roberts. He did have an opening for a college-educated teacher, to teach grades nine through twelve.

It looked like a lot of work for seventy-five dollars pet month. I would teach from nine till four, an hour off for lunch, with the day divided into thirty-four segments. It was mostly recitation and memorization.

My lesson plan was a three-inch stack of paper in a worn leather portfolio, and I would start work in six weeks.

I'd thought about getting a temporary job before school started, but it was obvious I wouldn't have time.

I had a basket full of books as well as the portfolio, and a keen sense of all I'd forgotten in the fifteen years since I'd left college. The prospect of declining Latin verbs again filled me with dread, and since childhood I had never been good with history, the memorization of names and dates. I had luck with the Latin, which was being taught by a specialist, but not with history, which of course was heavily weighted toward the history of Kansas and the West.

Without my asking, Daniel volunteered to go out and find a job till school started, which filled me with pride. He knocked on doors for a day, and got a job at a newspaper, theGlobe Live Stock Journal, cleaning up and sorting type for a dollar a day.

I opened a bank account with the wedding-ring and necklace money, and stored the seventy-three golden eagles in a safe-deposit box, putting them out of my mind. I wanted to hold on to the hard money for insurance. That turned out to be a wise precaution.

During those frantic six weeks we didn't meet many people. The two other lodgers at Mrs. Clifton's were stiff gentlemen who spoke in monosyllables at breakfast and supper, I think embarra.s.sed by the presence of a woman and child. One worked at William's Variety Story (and he was quite friendly when we showed up as customers); the other was a law clerk.

I did befriend Waylon Marcel I, the Methodist minister. I joined the choir and promised to help with Sunday school after regular school settled down. The other choir members were cordial but distant. After a few rehearsals I recognized the plain fact that it was a cla.s.s and regional conflict; I was an Eastern upper-cla.s.s woman, and to some of them I might as well have come from China. They did warm up after a few months.

Waylon Marcell would change my life. His church was doing informal missionary work (what we now might call "outreach") with a band of Arapaho families camped outside of town, and he wondered whether I, as an "educated woman," might get through to the women better than he. They just stared at him and made no comment, unlike the men, who enjoyed argument.

I had no luck at the time. But in the winter, huddled around the smoky fire in a tipi on Sunday afternoons, they would ask and answer questions. It would be good training for my future.

The months and years pa.s.s.

Teachers today would have a low opinion of the way we taught in the 1890s, but it served the students'

needs. I delivered facts to them, and enforced memorization by repet.i.tion, and then tested their memories. Authorities nowadays would feel I was stifling their creativity, but in fact we hardly had time to cover the basics.

Many, perhaps most, of the children in Dodge lived on farms, and they had jobs to do in season, which of course could not be put off. I was to find out that attendance was pretty good in the winter, subject to storms, but during planting and harvest I would be lucky to have three-quarters attending at any given day. Not the same three-quarters, either; families were large in those days, and the children would trade off. You had to have sympathy for them, but it didn't make teaching easy. I was in charge of seventy-two students, and keeping track of who had missed which lesson was quite a bookkeeping ch.o.r.e.

It was not easy on Daniel to be the teacher's son. There was taunting and, on a few occasions, fights with the cla.s.s bullies. My own difficulty, teaching him, was in resisting the natural inclination to favor him-and then resisting the contrary instinct to be too harsh on him, so that he would not seem to be favored. He was a subtle young man, though, and clearly understood the tightrope I was walking.

The work was tiring but curative, like diving into a pool whose waters conferred forgetfulness.

Philadelphia was lost in the day-today minutiae of teaching and administration.

Daniel was a handful, as any boy would be, growing through his teens. His initial disappointment with Dodge, though, gave way to a kind of worldly status, a big-city bravado. Few of his cla.s.smates knew anything of life except on the plains, and Philadelphia was much more exotic to them than Dodge City had been to Daniel.

A couple of months into the school year, and after I started teaching Sunday school, I suddenly realized that I was happier than I had been since college. And more at peace with myself than I had ever been.

Dodge had a history, but it was basically a Midwestern town, and I was finding that I liked the people and the life in that part of the country. I won't pretend that I didn't miss the cultural advantages and sometimes-gay social whirl of Philadelphia, but we did have plays and concerts in Dodge, and truly exuberant parties.

People didn't lock their doors when they went out. If you were short of money, the grocer would let you keep track and pay when you could. If anyone were in trouble-even if he was not particularly liked-his neighbors would join forces to help out.

Part of it must have been shared tribulation. After the hooligans like Bat Masterson and the Earp brothers moved on, Dodge settled into agriculture, chiefly cattle. Then the disastrous blizzard of January '86 buried most of the cows in great shoals of snow, pus.h.i.+ng them up against fences, to suffocate and freeze. The next year's drought took care of most of what was left.

So there was a quiet sense of people tempered by trouble, self-reliant but interdependent.

Daniel didn't share my comfort. The restlessness that had made him want Dodge was redirected, in his junior year, to the Yukon, when gold was discovered and thousands of men went north to make easy fortunes, or so they thought.

I wouldn't let him leave school, hoping that he would wake up and see the value of a college education (there was even a college of sorts in Dodge at the time). He was a sullen and dreamy student that last year, but he did stay in school, I think more for my sake than for his own ambition. A different kind of boy would have run away.

Then in his senior year, '97/'98, the newspapers started calling for Spanish blood, beating the drum for Cuban independence. In frozen February, the battles.h.i.+pMaine blew up and sank in Havana Bay. The saber-rattling grew more and more intense. Like most of his boy cla.s.smates, Daniel wanted to put on a uniform and go teach those Spaniards a thing or two.

Those of us old enough to have had lives shattered by the Civil War-by "b.l.o.o.d.y Kansas," in Dodge-were not so enthusiastic about the adventure. War was declared in April, and I forbade him to join the army battalion forming up in Topeka.

We had hot arguments about it, his manly blood aboil against my maternal protectiveness. I had been a mother far longer than he had been a man, though, and I won temporarily.

In July, he would turn eighteen, and be in charge of his own destiny. "What about the Yukon?" I said, desperate, preferring that he face blizzards rather than bullets. He said that it could wait. The gold wasn't going anywhere.

The Fourth of July celebration was frenetic with patriotism and righteous bellicosity, beginning with the description of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders' charge up San Juan Hill on July first. Then came word that the Spanish fleet had been totally destroyed at the Battle of Santiago.

My boy was in agony over the thought that the war might be over before he could get to Cuba. That was my most fervent wish, of course, and for that reason I cheered as loudly as the rest.

The fireworks were to give me nightmares, though. I dreamed I could see Daniel charging bravely through the enemy fusillade. Daniel lying torn and dying, dead, in the Cuban mud.

The next day, at dawn, I gave him one of the golden eagles, but not my blessing, for his birthday. He went down to the station to wait for the first train to Topeka.

Having gone to the safe-deposit box, I suppose the eagles were on my mind. But I had almost forgotten about the raven.

I was watering the newly planted vegetable patch, trudging back and forth from the outdoor pump, when I heard wings beating and was startled to turn and see an oversized raven in my path. I instantly recalled the one who had stopped my flight in Philadelphia.

It hopped twice and said, "No gold."

I think my heart actually stopped. "What?" It couldn't possibly be the same bird.

"No gold," it repeated, and didn't budge as I approached it.

"But I have gold," I said, feeling both moronic and terrified. "In the bank."

"No!" it screeched, and flapped up to eye level. "Gold!"

"What are you? Are you a sign?"

"No gold," it said again, almost quietly. Then it flew a block down the street and perched on the flagpole in front of the bank. "No gold!" loud, twice, and it flew away.

I stood there dumb under the baking sun, watching the bird disappear in the distance. Then I took off my sun hat and doused myself with well water.

I went inside and combed my hair and changed into a church blouse. I had a cup of cool tea and then went down to the bank and put all of the golden eagles into my purse, doubling its weight. At home I put them in a paper bag and hid them in the rice canister. I didn't know what else to do.

When Daniel returned the next afternoon, I was ecstatic to see him not in uniform, but that was only a temporary state. The regiment had accepted him, but told him to go home for a week to "put his affairs in order." I knew better than to suggest that he spend the week reconsidering his decision.

I wasn't thinking clearly myself. Of course he would have to use proper identification to prove he was of age; of course the army would send his name to various authorities, to make sure he wasn't a criminal on the run. Including the Pinkerton Agency.

It took until the seventh for Edward to catch up with us.

We had moved into our own small house a couple of weeks before, which made all the difference. A large man knocked on the door, and when I started to open it, he pushed his way inside.

"Pinkerton," he said, and showed a badge. "You kidnapped the son of Edward Tolliver."

"I did no such thing." He stepped forward, close enough to touch me, but I stood my ground. "I rescued my son from..."

"From what?" he demanded.

Saying the words almost made me vomit. "Sodomy. Incest."

"He said you had fantasies about that. You're a dangerous woman. You belong in jail."

"If I belong in jail," I said, "why don't you have an actual policeman along with you?"

"I have the authority-"

I cut him off. "In fact, why don't you and I go down to the sheriffs office and talk about this? I've known him for some years. We sing in the choir together."

That was the last word of mine he heard. Daniel had crept up behind him with a poker from the fireplace, and brought it down on his head with great force. He fell like a tree, the back of his head spouting blood.

"Daniel!"

"I didn't kill him. At least I don't think so." He turned the man over and put an ear to his chest. "Heart's beating."

My mind was spinning, but I did fasten upon a plan, a mad plan. "Rope. Let's tie him up and gag him. It could buy us enough time to get away."

We didn't have coils of rope lying around the house. The man next door had horses, though, and wasn't home, so Daniel "borrowed" a length of leather strap. We tied the Pinkerton man's hands behind his back, and his feet together, and put a tight gag around his mouth. Then we dragged him to the unused bedroom and Daniel locked him inside by kicking a wedge of wood under the door.

Daniel took his pistol. That would have interesting consequences.

I sent him running down to the station to get a cabriolet while I stuffed our trunks with clothes and then got the golden eagles from their hiding place, whispering a prayer of thanks to the raven.

The stationmaster was curious and concerned; I taught his son and daughter, and since this was Sunday, I would obviously be missing school for a day or more. I asked him to pa.s.s on word that I had a sister in Kansas City who'd had a stroke, and would telegraph as soon as I knew what was happening. Later I realized how flimsy that story was; the stationmaster had probably told the Pinkerton man where I lived, and then I suddenly showed up with all my worldly goods. Perhaps he didn't like policemen.

We wanted the first train to anywhere, of course, which meant Hays City, in ninety minutes. Daniel went back to guard the man while I waited at the station. It was only a five-minute bicycle ride for him; he would come as soon as he heard the train's whistle.

He told me he watched the man for an hour and he never moved. I never pressed him about it.

I only booked us through to Kansas City, figuring that we'd be harder to trace if we bought one ticket at a time. Waiting for the train to Hays and K.C., I went through the timetables and made a list.

Denver. San Francisco. Seattle. Sitka. Skagway. My boy would have his dream of the Yukon. Where Edward could never find him.

If the man had freed himself and got a fast horse, he might have caught us waiting in Hays. When we got there, I sat on the bench outside the station, clutching the bag that held his pistol, not sure what I would do if he came riding up full of fury.

At that time of my life, I was not sure whether I would be capable of violence. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm certain that I would have overcome lovingkindness and fear of G.o.d, and blown him off his horse, or at least tried. But I was not put to the test. The train pulled up at Hays on time and we started to put on miles.

Our most potent enemy was the telegraph. (It would be years before long-distance telephoning was common in the West.) If the Pinkerton man had gotten free, certainly his first action would have been to wire Kansas City, and have another agent waiting for the train.

That would have been interesting. Daniel had his fantasies about shoot-outs, but they probably didn't involve his mother on a train platform.