The Young Widow -- beginning sketches

THE YOUNG WIDOW

CHAPTER ONE -- ISOLATION

Beatrice walked slowly across the shiney wooden floor. Her shoes softly clicked against the freshly polished planks almost in tune with her anxious heart.

Her face was tear-stained and she melted into the cushioned chair. It's wooden circular back cupped her in comfortably and she breathed a sigh of cautious relief.

"I have made a decision," she began. "Please add my name to the list of widows. I want to serve with them. The children...here at the school and in the homes like in the McClintocks and Van Hugens...they need a mother to mother their own mothers...I...can do that..."

"But you are only 24 years old, Beatrice Katarina. Widows who do this ministry are at least 60 years old. I will call you Beatrice Katrina as that is what your fa..."

"I know. My father always called me that. He is gone and yes, you have been like a father to me, but please hear my plight then..."

"I call you by your full name at this point because you are being unreasonable. You have your whole life ahead of you Little Beatrice..."

"Oh? I'm a little girl, unable to help herself or live on her own?"

"No. Beatrice! Listen. I am like a father to you, yes, but now I speak to you as your pastor. You need to get a hold of yourself. You can't impose on God's commands what you wish when you feel like it. The book of Titus teaches the older women will teach the younger. That is God's command. You need to be...

"Old. I got it. Pastor Frank, I got it...I ..."

Beatrice Katrina Engeltjes buried her face and sobbed uncontrollably. Her face contorted and her mind raced over the past year of her life. Images suffocated her. The racing team of horses with Indian arrows piercing the kegs of milk, sacks of cheese, her husband's chest, her horror of it all. Then she winced at Bethany Ann laying in her arms and suddenly going still and cold. The promises of Holland to come to America and make a life on a homestead sliced through her heart and she stopped breathing. I left Elberg, Hollandfor this?

"I left Elberg for this?!!" she heard herself scream at Pastor Frank.

The night the team came in, she vividly remembers standing by the kitchen window musing at the soft Midwest sunset how it scattered slowly absorbing every cloud transforming blue to golden orange setting the sky on fire. The smell of the Dutch streams and canals flooded her memory as she inhaled the soft rainfall of Minnesota.

Then the screeching of flailing reigns and wild horse cries.
She frantically put her tightly woven gardening gloves on and feverishly ran outside. The horses whinnied crazily and she grabbed each reign "Ho! Hey! Ho!" just three shouts she preached to herself amidst her own frenzy. Her eyes scampered across the arrow-pierced crates of cheese and cartons of eggs. The entire cart dripped white liquid from the kegs of milk pierced through with more arrows. Almost dreamlike the horses instantly hushed under her caresses and she glimpsed the driver's seat carefully.

Fighting her swirling head and thumping heart, she uncontrollably released screaming rage. "NO!!! NO!!! NO!!!" Her body fled from one horse to the next horse and rounded the buggy. She lifted her shuddering body onto the driver's seat and grabbed his lifeless, limp body. "WILLIAM!!! NO! "Wills...William! My Love, wake up. No, you wake up."

His white, cotton shirt that she had carefully ironed that morning was crimson through and through. Her life flashed in front of her and her blood-drenched hands pulled at his shirt searching for the wound. Then she found it. It was twitching weakly with a trickling flow of blood. Her hand grabbed the evil projectile and she screamed.

She threw herself across his upper body and pulled it with all her strength and it resisted as if she were pulling an entire tree trunk of ten tons. "Wills, wake up," she almost whimpered like a dumb struck cat. "William, we have a baby. She needs her Daddy. You can't leave us." She found her self thrashing her head all around and jumping off the buggy. Her grief-stricken body thrusted long chestnut brown hair that whipped her face and she screamed even more. Bethany Ann's cries scattered through the nearby bedroom window and pierced her ears.

"Pastor Frank, as soon as I buried William, I buried her. The fever took her and you were there. You helped me bury them, the first souls in the church's graveyard, side by side. Pastor, I have nothing. I have no where to go. Who will come out here to marry me? I am like a Naomi who couldn't have children and a husband if she wanted to. The Van Hugens need me. Please allow me to visit Martha and counsel with her to guide her to raise her children. Please equip me to equip her."

"She's ten years older than you, Beatrice"

"Ten years younger in spirit..."

"If you insist...I'll add your name to our six widows who minister..."

"I insist."



CHAPTER TWO -- THE GOWN

Beatrice rocked back and forth and back and forth. The Charlesville musket lie on her arm. Her breath was metered and laborsome as she reaced over and picked up her Bible and propped it atop the musket. She steadied the Book across the gun’s long wooden body and squirmed and stopped rocking. She sat and glanced at scripture “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” She read it sufficiently enough to burn it into her brain. Her blurred eyes wet and sore from crying, prevented all the words to impact her soul. Here and there, phrases penetrated the flowing tears “…hide me in the secret of His pavilion,” “…in the time of trouble,” “…set me high upon a rock.”

They all echoed in her soul, morsel for morsel.

She started rocking again.

Her body grew limp and motionless and the Bible tumbled from her lap onto the floor, but somehow the Charlesville stayed put. Her other arm also cradled a treasure: her brown, silk taffeta wedding gown. It rarely left her presence. Somehow she took it with her throughout the house when at home and fell asleep with it, swathed between her arm the rocking chair’s arm. The musket lay on one arm, the gown on the other. And so she slept. She slept like this often. Her pillow was drenched in tears any time she slept in the four poster bed. It had been near a year and she still couldn’t last a night-long’s rest there.

Suddenly she awoke. Instinctively she felt for her gun that now lay cockeyed at her ankles. She bent over and gathered it’s skinny form into her arms. She jumped up and the brown silk taffeta gown tore. “Ugh!” The wide gaping hole strewn from the edge of the rocking chair’s arm instantly destroyed the beauty of it’s sheen and textured browns that had once delicately melded into one fabric. It stared at her as if to mock her in her mourning. She wanted to scream with all that was in her, but managed to shove her fisted hand into her mouth and bite down and winced.

Slowly she removed herself completely away from chair and gown and cocked the gun in her arms. She made her way to the front window, tapping the curtains with the gun’s nose ever slightly and peered out. Then she unlatched the wooden bar and swung the door immediately open pointing her musket all about into the garden and the trees. Something moved. She heard it. Her heart raced and she could feel her eyes swell with every piece of moonlight that danced across the alfalfa fields and corn fields in the distance. The fir trees seemed to be waving at her and her head felt dizzy. She ran screaming into the fir tree nearest her door. “Come out! Come out! Show yourself! You coward! You killed my husband! You murderer! Now you lie in wait for my blood too!!! Coward! Coward! Come out!”

Off in the still, cool distance, a lone wolf howled.

Her body shuttered and her gun went off. The muskets ricocheted against the white wooden shed across the garden and pinged all about in her ears. “Agghhh! You COWARD! Show yourself! I will kill you now! Show yourself! I am not afraid of you!”

There was a rustling in nearby bushes and Beatrice ran toward the sound. Suddenly a galloping horse thundered by and she swung the Charlesville and took aim. The muskets rippled through the night and the horse was gone.

Beatrice screamed after the noise, “COWARD!” She aimed her gun still in the bushes and fir trees and backed into her doorway, scanning the moonlit landscape before. Suddenly she felt her foot fall on a furry object and she lept and automatically shot at it. It flew across the ground, but it was not dead for it was not any sort of animal. It looked like a squirrel, but it seemed it’s legs and head were missing. Beatrice slowly inched toward it and picked it up with her hands and caressed the smooth buckskin. The fragment she held was richly beaded. She scooped up the bits and pieces and shook the shrapnel from each one. Her hands apologetically tried putting the pieces back together, but her anger and confusion got the better of her and she ran into the kitchen and grabbed her hunting knife. She lay the beaded buckskin on the wooden floor of her kitchen and stabbed it and shredded it and stabbed it some more.


CHAPTER THREE -- THE BARN and RED CHERRY WHISKEY

It was a bright and sunny day and Beatrice made her way from the vegetable garden to the barn. It was a well built barn. It's posts needed no nails or ties. Every log was perfectly notched, each notch flushed crossbeam into another and it rose tall into the sunlight and the frame's planks fit snugly all around. William had hauled all the logs himself, chopped and drug and hauled from the forest for weeks. She helped him debark every log and he fashioned each one lovingly. He cut and molded and shaped and notched. Pastor Frank and others had come for the barn raising and it was up in a day. Potato salad, beef brisket and fried cakes - the ones with blueberries - were feasted on until late into the evening of their barn raising. Little daughters of Martha and Todd twirled in their cotton dresses as William struck a fiddle song again and again. The girls giggled and giggled and Beatrice stroked her growing womb in and mused over the future and sure hope to hold her baby before the winter snow.

One of the farmers called out, "Hey Wills! I gotcha ya some brew! I found your bottle. Care you take a swig 'fore I carry it home to Elena?" William had gladly slurped a long gulp of the whiskey. "Ahh, the many alcoholic options we have on the prairie!"

They'd only had the red cherry whiskey. They either drank it cold in the winter by leaving it outdoors for a bit, or room temperature in the summer.

Beatrice walked over to the hens and collected the eggs carefully placing them in her strawlined basket. She chuckled to herself and whispered, "Red cherry whiskey...that William could make the best red cherry whiskey...how in the dickens he concocted that brew I'll never know...never hear tell of where he kept the brewing-still even...oh William...best I'd never discovered it either as it'd probably had had a short life if I were to find it...did taste good though." She pursed her lips and tasted salty tears instead. She sat and wept and inhaled the smell of fresh hay. It filled the thick-barred finely sanded trough. Oats filled the tinier compartment and all the rest was filled with hay. She mused over the three foot by 6 foot manger and skimmed her hands over the hay strands and imagined Mary settling the Christ Child in such a thing. "Did Mary get it warm enough for You? Did You smell it strongly and woodsy like I smell it now? Was it overpowering for Your little nose and did You sneeze like it makes me sneeze on a hot sultry day? Do you remember Your earthly "birth"?

The Holstein lowed and, Beatrice lost in thoughts of the Holy Birth, ambled over and plopped down on the three legged wooden stool. She grabbed the bulging utters that seemed hot to the touch and pushed down at amost a perfect 45 degree angle and squirted out warm milk. Her wrists felt odd and sharp stinging pains would shoot up to her elbow. She ignored the early dull pains until they shot sharper and sharper. In annoying stubbornness, she finally stood up and grabbed the barely wet tin bucket and set it aside and knocked the stool away with her foot. She then replaced the tin bucket under the utter and hunkered down on her tip toes and let her cotton skirt fall between her thighs, and upon steadying herself, began to squirt some more white liquid. It dripped and squirted and squirted forcefully more than it dripped. "Oh...this dreadful day!" she released a tired sigh and stood up and wiped her hair away with wet hands and walked toward the garden once more. Now her ankles started to ache.