Tomorrow, the River

The Oh My’s Rooftop Floor Plan

The Oh My’s Main Level Floor Plan

POINT OF DEPARTURE

A gull circles

and splashes down

and paddles into

a perfect circle

of sudden sun,

gray wings

lighted into

a radiant silver,

body a white

splendor of feathers,

the rise and fall

of waves against

the heart of the bird

as graceful as clouds.

It makes me think,

maybe a place

is waiting for us

where we leave behind

our clumsy feet,

our everyday clothing,

and swim for the spotlight,

our own shining time

on the water.

—Kirsten Dierking, Northern Oracle

Chapter 1

THE BURLINGTON AND MISSOURI EASTBOUND

June 26, 1896

I WASN’T MYSELF WHEN I BOARDED THE EASTBOUND. WEARING MY sisters’ clothing didn’t help. Hester’s shoes were too big, and Lila’s wedding suit was too long. The shoe caught the hem of the skirt, jerking me to a stop before I’d reached the top of the coach car steps. I might have freed myself if not for the handle of Mama’s musty-smelling cartpetbag clutched in one hand and the lunch basket clutched in the other. As it was, I couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. I might still be in that predicament if the conductor hadn’t tugged the skirt out from under the shoe and then raised the hem nearly to my knees so I could finish my climb without tripping up again. From the platform behind me, Mama gasped.

The conductor then took my elbow and guided me into the baggage section of the railway car. Most passengers find that they have a more pleasant trip if they store their bags in the bins, miss, he said, reaching for Mama’s carpetbag.

He didn’t know my mama. She’d given me strict orders not to let go of the carpetbag no matter what. I shook my head and tightened my grip.

The conductor tightened his jaw.

The elbow again, and soon I was standing in the aisle of the coach car’s seating section, running through the list of where I should and should not sit. Sit with a woman. Not a painted-up woman, but a fresh-scrubbed one. A grandmotherly type would be good, Mama had said. And don’t sit with a man, especially not a smooth-talking, slick-dressing dandy, my sister Hester had advised. Above all, don’t sit in a seat by yourself. It’d be like saying, ‘Come on over’ to all those smooth-talking, slick-dressing dandies, my sister Lila had added with a finger wag. Then there was my brother Joey’s advice: Sit up front with the engineer and save yourself all the trouble. Joey was twelve.

What Mama and my sisters hadn’t figured on was a car with only five other passengers, all of whom were men. The conductor, again, saying that the train would be pulling out soon and why didn’t I take the first empty seat on my right. I did as I was told, fitted the carpetbag onto my lap and the lunch basket close beside me, and then turned to wave at Mama through the window. Mama might have waved back if she hadn’t been straining to free herself from the lock Hester and Lila had on her. And she might have smiled if her lips hadn’t been talking so fast. I couldn’t make out her exact words, but I guessed she was letting her worry out.

Mama thought fourteen was too young for a girl to travel alone. But Mama had her rules. She couldn’t very well have said no to my spending the summer as a mother’s helper to my sister Hannah, when she’d already promised me to Lila when Lila’s new baby arrived in September and to Hester when Hester’s new baby arrived in November. Mama’s rules would have lost their wings, though, if she’d have known about the letter I’d secretly sent to Hannah, begging her to invite me and promising to pay my own way.

Being a mother’s helper wasn’t new to me. Since passing the eighth-grade exam at Harmony School a year ahead of all the other girls my age, Mama had hired me out to two of my cousins’ families, all with new babies in the house, though the help that was required had nothing to do with cooing or cuddling. I’d cooked and scrubbed, tended to the older children, mended and ironed. My wages had been half of what I might have earned if working for a family I wasn’t related to. The important thing, as Mama had reminded me repeatedly, was invaluable practice. But practice wasn’t something I could hold in the palm of my hand and count.

As it was, I’d earned only enough money to purchase the $11.50 railway ticket that had gotten me aboard the Eastbound, and a $3.50 return ticket that would get me only partway home. Mama didn’t know about the partway-home part. I’d have to figure out a way to earn myself all the way home, and I had a start. Mama had given me two dollars from her egg money. For telegrams, she’d said, pinning the bills to the inside of my camisole. How much could a few words cost?

Hester and Lila were still holding Mama back when the train began to pull away. When I began to pull away. I grabbed onto Mama then, too, holding her with my eyes. Holding and holding . . . a lump forming in my throat and expanding with each of the steam locomotive’s chug-a-choos. Holding and holding . . . until my eyes got to stinging so bad I couldn’t help but rest them with a long blink. When my eyes opened again it was as if someone had flipped the page in a picture book. Prairie Hill station had been replaced by the corral behind Wilson’s livery stable, and Mama had been replaced by a swayback horse. Another blink and the horse turned into a mangy old dog pawing through a pile of rubbish behind Sloan’s Eatery, and then the dog blurred into a gravedigger throwing dirt in the Methodist church cemetery.

By the time the backside of Prairie Hill had given way to cornfields, the chug-a-choos were packed so tightly together I couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began—ch-ch-ch-ch. A snake-spooked horse gallops pretty fast, especially when you’re riding bareback and holding on for dear life, but even the healthiest horse would have dropped dead in its tracks after a quarter mile of trying to race the Eastbound. The telegraph poles sailed past my window as if tick marks on a measuring stick—counting me farther away from home, farther away from Mama and her worried-sick heart. When the locomotive approached the first road crossing, I swear I heard real words mixed in with the steam whistle’s mournful cry— poooooor Mama. There was no holding back my tears after that.

I fumbled in the carpetbag for my handkerchief, all the while sniffling and thinking about how lost Mama was going to be without me. Of her four daughters, I was the only one still living at home. Hester and Lila lived nearby and visited often, though Mama said that wasn’t the same. There was one other woman in the house—my brother Jake’s wife, Alice. But Mama and Alice didn’t see eye to eye on much of anything. Mama dredged her chicken pieces in flour; Alice dredged in cornmeal. Mama believed open windows were good for our health; Alice believed open windows let in too much dust and barnyard stink. With me away, who will take Mama’s side? I dug deeper in the carpetbag and came up with, instead of my handkerchief, a splendid, tear-drying idea. I’d get off the Eastbound at the next stop and wait for the Westbound to whisk me back to Prairie Hill. I’d do it for Mama!

When the Eastbound steamed away from Highland station, I was still onboard. I hadn’t abandoned my plan to return home for Mama, only postponed it. I’d need a good story for why I’d cut my journey short, and I’d been too busy gawking out the window to come up with one. The freshly sprouted fields and cow-dotted pastures were no different from those on our farm, except that I was seeing them from a fast-moving perch. The rows of corn, which farmers took pride in planting arrow-straight, appeared to angle toward one another until coming together at a far-distant and perplexing point. Thinking I might be able to set the rows straight again, I crossed my eyes. This caused an even more startling sight. It was as if the train was standing still and the world outside the window was racing past, instead of the other way around. Then I remembered one of Mama’s scoldings, Cross your eyes and they’ll stay that way. I uncrossed, and the outside world dug in its heels and skidded to a stop.

Halfway between the Highland and Denton stations, the sky darkened and rain spattered the coach car windows. I occupied myself watching the raindrops perform a watery version of the Virginia reel. Two droplets reached out to one another as if in a curtsy and bow, then the two became one and cut a downward path through the other droplets. Two, then four, then six, and then eight, pairing and sliding into a shimmering rivulet. I could have watched the droplets dance for hours, if my hot breath hadn’t fogged up the window.

I turned my attention to the interior of the coach car. The car was shaped like a loaf of bread—flat sides with a curved top. The walls were lined with polished wood the color of dark rye. The plush-looking seats weren’t out-of-the-oven doughy soft, but they weren’t hard either. They sat more like day-old. All those thoughts of bread led to thoughts of hunger. My hunger. Before taking a bite out of the thick hunk of wheat bread Mama had packed for me, I raised it to my nose. It smelled of home. Though Mama had intended the bread to last the whole of the twenty-four-hour train trip, I was suddenly ravenous and gobbled the entire hunk in that one sitting, which left only the jerked beef, dried apricots, and crumbled applesauce cookies to fold back into the paper and return to the belly of my lunch basket.

I didn’t get off at the Denton station, because the rain had turned into a gully washer. Mama’s Sunday hat, Hester’s spare pair of shoes, and Lila’s worsted wedding suit were loans, not hand-me-downs I could keep. I had strict orders that these things be returned—uncrushed, unscuffed, unstained, untorn, un-rained-on, un-anything.

The rain had let up by the time the Eastbound stopped at the castle-like station in Lincoln, the first real city—its backside, anyway—I’d ever seen, but I didn’t get off there either. Didn’t dare. Not after turning down smooth, slick man’s offer.

I’d been bent over the carpetbag, double-checking to see if my partway-home railway ticket was still tucked inside my everyday left shoe, when a silky-sounding male voice asked, First time away from home?

I glanced up. The man’s hair was slicked back with pomade, and the suit of clothes he wore looked like it had come from the most expensive pages in the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue. "Oh no, sir, I’m in the army . . . no, I mean my husband is in the army, and I’m on my way to join him. He’s burly. This was a story Lila had cooked up. Like a cake made with too few eggs, it flopped. Smooth, slick man slid into my seat. His smile smelled of cigars, which wasn’t surprising since he soon told me he was a cigar salesman from Chicago. By the time the train pulled into Lincoln station, his destination, I knew everything there was to know about the cigar business, and smooth, slick man had invited me to get off the train with him so he could teach me how to smoke one. All the finest women in Chicago are smoking cigars these days," he’d said, winking.

The train was scheduled to stay at Lincoln station for thirty minutes, to take on fresh supplies of water and coal, so there would have been time to take smooth, slick man up on his offer, but I turned him down. Not because I was squeamish about trying something new, and not because Mama had told me not to get off the train No matter what. I turned down his offer because of that wink. I’d learned the meaning behind winks without needing any lectures from Mama or my sisters. Every wink that had come my way had come from boys who wanted to steal a kiss behind the schoolhouse.

The coach car was nearly filled when the conductor called All aboard! at Lincoln station. I might have looked around for someone else to sit with, someone who looked like they hadn’t winked in a good long while, if I hadn’t been sitting in that one spot for so long that it had started to feel kind of homey. A couple of folks tarried at the edge of my seat, but all moved on up the aisle when they saw that the unoccupied half was taken up by Mama’s carpetbag.

When the chug-a-choos started up again, my face was buried in the Burlington and Missouri Traveler’s Guide. In three more hours, the train would be crossing the Missouri River at Plattsmouth. I thought on that for a while and decided it would be foolish of me to have come so far without at least letting my eyes soak in a real river before returning home.

Upon leaving Lincoln, the tracks nosed northeast. The land turned hilly, and the coach car swayed as the tracks curved this way and that through the valleys. Swayed so much at times that folks trying to walk in the aisle were forced to grab hold of seatbacks. That’s how I came to make the acquaintance of Horace Blount. He’d been down the aisle before, asking those with newspapers if they’d pass the papers on to him when they’d finished reading them. He was making his way down the aisle a second time, his nose stuck in one of those hand-me-down newspapers, when a particularly tight curve landed him in my seat and his newspaper in my lap.

Sorry, miss, he said, then pulled Mama’s crushed carpetbag out from under him and set about tugging on the sides as if trying to restore its shape.

I set about refolding the newspaper while reading Horace with a sideways glance. He looked to be seventeen or eighteen. Beneath his patchy beard, his face was quite handsome. There was a button missing from his vest, his shirt lacked starch, his collar was frayed, and his shoes showed the scuffs of hard wear. Having assured myself that he failed the slick-dresser test, I boldly thrust my right hand in his direction. I’m Megan Barnett. Nice to make your acquaintance.

Horace Blount, he said, giving my hand a sturdy shake before returning