The Good Journey - Hardcover

Gilchrist, Micaela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684871432 ISBN 13: 9780684871431

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

After a brief courtship, Mary Bullitt finds herself married to General Henry Atkinson, a virtual stranger, and on her way from Louisville to the frontier outpost at St. Louis, where her husband has his headquarters and where Mary finds harsh living conditions, the constant threat of Indian attack, and a growing awareness that she knows nothing about the man she married. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Micaela Gilchrist is the author of The Good Journey, winner of the Women Writing the West Award and the Colorado Book Award. She lives with her family in Colorado.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

Louisville, Kentucky, January 1826

gThere is no place more unforgiving or colder than a Louisville church on the first Sunday after Christmas, I thought as I navigated my way to our family pew. Despite the clutter of bodies, the air was glacial perfection, and with each passing moment, my hands and feet became more blockish and icy. Surely this was what was meant by mortification of the flesh. I grimaced at the Reverend Shaw, who said there was no contradiction to be found in the biblical entreaty to render unto Caesar. I could have cared less what Caesar was or was not owed, because the winter sun through the window burned a nick upon the back of my neck.

My neck was on fire and my feet were numb with cold. They would find me dead in my place after service, with a scalded neck and blue, frostbitten feet. I slumped in the pew, away from the light, and poked the leather cover of my psalmbook with a gloved finger. That winter, I was twenty-two and discomfited at having been forced to attend service. Mama rapped me sharply with her Bible. I gasped and bent over, complaining of a fainting spell. The odor of wood oil filled my nostrils. I peered around Ma and caught the gaze of a brigadier general grinning from the pew directly across the aisle. He leaned over his knees with his hands upon his white breeches, mocking my discomfort.

I stared at the General in a way that I hoped made him feel much reduced in rank. I quirked a brow, which he mistook for encouragement, because he tickled the air with his fingers. I lifted my chin to let him know I disapproved, but he seemed pleased by my lofty pretense. He looked pointedly at the door and then at me. Forty, I estimated, about the same age as my pa, and he died of the afflictions of age in the spring of last year. This General was dark haired; he had a proud and stern countenance and remarkable blue eyes.

I was intrigued by his bad behavior and felt an odd prickling on the surface of my forearms when he regarded me as if determining my worth. My seventeen-year-old sister, the precocious Eloise, a child prone to homely outbursts about the mischief in her heart, squirmed about as the General smiled at her. At the tap of Eloise's fingers upon my skirt, I tipped my ear to catch her whispers.

"He is as proud as a prince and he's staring so lasciviously. What kind of a man stares so in church?"

I wiggled my fingers and blew upon them. "Glance away, Eloise, do not meet his gaze; you should elevate your thoughts and disregard that gentleman. And you hush up. Mama's going to beat me like a stray dog if I let you whisper at me through service."

"Mary, I was wrong. That is no stare; that rises to a leer. He is at least as old as Papa, and military men are poor, even the generals."

"Eloise, look at my neck. Am I getting a blister on my neck from sunburn?"

She wrinkled her nose and examined me. "No, but you have farmer wrinkles there. Looks to me as if you've passed summers tethered to the hemp-break wheels at Oxmoor. Mary! Will you focus on the matter at hand? I was talking to you about that general over there who wants you. Listen to me!" Eloise rubbed her hands over mine. "I was at General Cadwallader's last evening for the musicale, and by the bye, Lizzie Griffin played the harp so ploddingly you would have thought her loaded up to her ears with laudanum. All Lizzie could talk about last night was your admirer, that ruddy-faced general across the aisle. She said he's come from St. Louis, and though he spends his days at the Western Department headquarters, he spends his nights searching for a bride. The General has declared himself ready for sons. Now he goes in search of their mother. The rumor is, several belles have set their caps for him."

"I hope he finds a respectable old widow. They could spoon castor oil into one another and commiserate about the gout."

"Lizzie says you're in view of his sparking." I ignored that comment. It was too dreadful to contemplate. Eloise blathered on: "It was Uncle William Clark who is guilty of arranging this. He thinks you're hopeless, Mary. He told me so, over supper yesterday. Just you watch, that general will force an introduction to Ma after service. Indeed, I'll wager Mama expects such a thing. Surely Uncle William has talked to her. It's a conspiracy to deprive you of your freedom. They're going to toss the yoke of subjugation about your shoulders and force you to give birth to furry little babies that look just like that general."

Mama swooped over me in a rustle of organdy, sending her anise-scented breath my way. She put her lips to my ear and whispered, "Mary, take one peek over the aisle at the handsome general and smile fetchingly."

I puckered my chin and rubbed my cold fingers upon it, because it pleasantly resembled a peach pit. "Fetchingly, Mama? What's your idea of 'fetchingly'?"

"Like this," Eloise simpered, rattling her eyelashes and rounding her lips into a coo.

I squinted at the General. By this time, he was brashly ignoring the sermon altogether and had turned sideways on the bench to stare boldly at me with an amused expression. The General had a disconcerting manner of looking at a woman. In the dark confines of my black satin slippers, I curled my toes.

Eloise leaned back and looked around behind my head. "It's not as though the General's hands are bluish and shaky. He's not drooling, and I don't see a walking stick. He appears vigorous. Maybe you could get one baby out of him before he dies."

Mama lifted the flat of her hand and walloped me.

"Mama, I did not come to church to harvest bruises!"

"I told you to smile once at that general, Mary, not babble to Eloise all through service. Now, you girls be reverent, mind your prayers and your manners. And don't look at that general anymore. One glance is enough, or you'll appear too eager. Honestly, sometimes I feel I've failed utterly. I'm raising up a litter of Hottentots."

Of course, lingering in the air at all times was Mama's disappointment in me. Mama was a Gwathmey, one of the Grand English Gwathmeys of the Virginia tidewater. She was all sangfroid, stepping elegantly through her days as if expecting courtiers to assemble and pay homage. I suppose I am more like my father.

Pa's family, the Louisville Bullitts, were originally the French Huguenot Bouilits, a name that meant to seethe or boil, a fairly apt description of my temperament. He raged through his years, accumulating land, cash and human beings, then died of an apoplectic fit with his face swimming in a bowl of two o'clock burgoo. When I was seventeen, Pa spent a summer's income upon my coming-out ball. He had a garden of white flowers shipped from Louisiana, hired an orchestra and imported a gown of Flemish lace from Antwerp, then hosted a grand dinner for two hundred people.

"Why not just tether me and expose my bosom like a mulatto slave on the auction block?" I railed as I was pulled from my room. "Why not strip me down to my stays and let the boys see the goods?"

"Some might not like the look of your ass, and then where would you be?" Pa snorted as he arm-yanked me down the staircase.

The year I met the General, I had just celebrated my birthday and was a very naïve twenty-two-year-old, gone socially stale by Louisville's courtship standards. You see, I was widely perceived as being difficult. Mama had told me to select a man in my youth when I was freshest and allow him to guide me as nature had directed.

"You are a ripe and fruitful olive, Mary. You must learn to accept your vocation."

I waited for Mama to tell me what my vocation must be, but the wretched truth was that my belly was my future, and what future is that? She told me that my highest aspiration must be to bear children. To ensure my obedience, my parents sent me away to the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans on my fifteenth birthday. How I loathed the scorch of that city. Why, I felt as if I had been espaliered like a peach tree, forced to bloom in a climate where I could never flourish unless restrained. The Ursulines made an expert button polisher of me. I was forever getting into trouble for refusing to do as I was told. My punishment was to launder the chemises and polish the buttons of the whole convent with Spanish whiting until my fingers cracked and bled. In my third year, when I was eighteen, I was sent home midterm with a letter pinned to my frock-apron.

Dear Monsieur Bullitt,

Mary inspires the other girls to heresy and temporal revelry. We would rather she inflicted her obstinacy elsewhere.

Sincerely, Mother Froissart.

P.S. A generous donation will not work this time.

Mama had sobbed distressingly for a fortnight.

"If even the Romanists can't tame our girl, no one will; she is lost, O Lord, she is lost forever to the Kingdom. Maybe we could try giving her to the Baptists. I understand they are much less convivial than we Episcopalians."

Pa's jowls flapped as he paced the floor. "Pah! She's rotted clean through. Jaysus would get back up on his cross if he were married to her, so you may as well begin your search now for some sucker who is more patient than the Almighty."

Apparently, the patient sucker charged with my redemption was sitting across the aisle from me in the blue uniform of the United States Army. When the service ended, I rose stiffly from the pew and found my dress clinging immodestly to my legs. As I fluffed my petticoats, I peered up to see the General reveling in my discomfort. His eyes were full of wicked sparkle that I did not appreciate one little bit. And after service, my family shivered together upon the limestone steps while we waited for our carriage to be brought around. I huddled with Eloise, bouncing from one foot to another and hissing at our driver, "Hurry, hurry." Mama conversed with the reverend. While the children giggled and tumbled like marbles in the snow, Eloise pointed frantically at the vestry, warning me that the General was coming in our direction.

The Reverend Shaw gently steered Mama around to greet the General.

"Mrs. Bullitt, may I present General Henry Atkinson, recently arrived from St. Louis, and working temporarily at the Western Department headquarters here in Louisville."

"Oh, yes. I understand you are a good friend of Uncle William's?"

"Yes, we consult one another several times a week as he manages Indian affairs for Missouri, and I am required to keep the peace along the frontier."

"That's rather a large job, I'd imagine," Ma said as she hooked a strand of hair into the ruched lining of her bonnet.

"Aye, but requiring more patience than anything else."

"General, you must come to visit. On the morrow, perhaps?" Ma smiled pointedly at me.

As Ma and the reverend talked, the General lit his pipe and stared a proprietary stare at me. And though I hated to admit it, I found him handsome. His white trousers were tucked into his shiny black boots. Despite the cold, he wore no cape, and he unbuttoned his blue uniform coat and summed me up. I let my eyes wander and found myself looking at his hands. He had removed his gloves, and I stared at his broad palms and the fine, dark hair on his long fingers. What was it Lizzie Griffin said about a man's fingers? My eyes drifted to the General's white breeches.

Mama coughed, then pinched me on the upper arm.

The General narrowed his gaze with a small, secretive grin at me. Fearing he could read my mind, I quickly averted my glance to the snow under my slippers.

"Tomorrow, then, Miss Bullitt?" the General asked.

I shrugged my response, and he smiled once again.

Ma bowed her head as if the Holy Ghost had anointed her. The drivers pulled the two barouches to the curb, and all thirteen of us shuffled in, sat atop one another, poking and knobbing until we were situated to bear the short ride home. I tried to calm the shrews running wild through my belly as I took a last look at the General.

"He is a bit insouciant, but this is to be expected." Ma gave me a blithe pat upon the hand, then pulled the shade.

On the morning the General came to call, he tied his horse to the iron hitching post by the stone steps. The General strolled through the house with his hands clasped firmly behind his back, looking directly ahead as if the walls were invisible and he was keeping watch over something on a distant horizon. He made no comment on the furnishings or frippery. I admired this about him; it raised him in my estimation.

The General found the great hall crowded with my little brothers and sisters, who thundered up the stairs, slid down the balustrade, then started over again, hollering all the while. They glared at him as if he were something vile that had slithered up from the falls. He glared back, and they were duly cowed. Mama danced down the stairs with a regal swishing noise, one hand lifting the skirts of her aubergine gown, the other waving a welcome to the General. But her greeting was interrupted by footfalls upon the threshold of the front entrance, followed by Uncle William Clark's voice sounding sharply and urgently.

Eloise clutched at me with a worried look. "What do you suppose they're about?"

"Miss Eloise, we must investigate," I whispered.

It was easy to dash about undetected in our house. Pa had built the limestone thing as a monument to himself. I called it "the old sepulcher," which infuriated Mama. Visitors wandered through the rooms, gaping at the black walnut floors so polished they appeared as dark water underfoot, at the lofty ceilings, the tiger-maple and rosewood marquetry, the sixteenth-century Italian furniture, Flemish tapestries and hand-painted wallpapers. There were portraits of dead Bullitts, Gwathmeys and Clarks in every hall.

But Eloise and I were still in dressing robes with our hair floating behind us. To be seen in sleeping clothes and naked feet by men, worse yet, by a man who had come to court, was an act of unpardonable lewdness, punishable by a whipping. Thrilled by the promise of intrigue and our own brashness, we crept hand in hand toward the library, listening to the General and Uncle William Clark bark at one another. Having had his hopes for the governorship of Missouri dashed, Uncle served as the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and the General enforced federal regulations pertaining to the Indians on the frontier. That was all I understood of their lives. Mama said Uncle and the General were fast friends.

Eloise squared her shoulders against the wall as if someone were pressing a musket to her heart. She lifted her chin and stared at the ceiling. I thought her posture rather too dramatic. I crouched low, hugging my knees as I strained to hear what they were saying.

Uncle was agitated. He paced back and forth, popping his fist into his palm to emphasize his points: "I shall thrust a wedge into the heart of that tribe, that's what. Split 'em in two. I will make it clear to the Sauk Nation that I will not negotiate with that scrawny little bastard Black Hawk."

I peeked round the pilaster to...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684871432
• ISBN 13: 9780684871431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400