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Kathryn, Days of Struggle and Triumph, Daighters of Courage #1

By Donna Fletcher Crow

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Chapter 1

“But Papa, it’s all brown!”
Seventeen-year-old Kathryn Esther Jayne stepped off the train and looked around her at the desolate, flat land covered with scrubby, knee-high bushes the color of greasy dishwater.
Adam Jayne flicked the dust off his almost-black mustache, which contrasted oddly with his brown hair. “That’s why we’ve come here, my girl. Your Uncle Isaiah says this is the land of opportunity. With this new Reclamation Act Congress just passed they’ll be building dams and canals all over. In no time at all the desert will be blossoming like a rose—just like it says in the Good Book.”
The train blew a great cloud of steam and chugged noisily on down the track, leaving Kathryn and her papa deserted beside the unpainted wooden shack that served as a station and storage shed. It was the only building in sight.
When the Oregon Shortline train was far enough down the track that she could be heard, Kathryn shook her head. “Blossom as a rose? Those aren’t rose bushes. What is that awful stuff?”
Adam swept the desert with his arm. “Sagebrush. You’ve just come through about a thousand miles of it on the train.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think I’d have to live in it.” She stared at the empty sweep of land. There was nothing but sagebrush as far as she could see until a line of blue mountains broke the skyline about twenty miles away. Kathryn sighed. She had wanted only two things in her life—beauty and God’s will. But the two always seemed to be in conflict. Her mother had been beautiful—so people said—but Kathryn had no memory of her. And the Lord certainly hadn’t seen fit that Kathryn should inherit her beauty. Even on the empty platform Kathryn ducked her head at the thought of the square jaw she hated to see in the mirror.
Their home in Edgar, Nebraska, had had beauty—green prairie farms, trees along the Little Blue River, and only last summer she had achieved her greatest delight—three rose bushes bloomed in the yard of their white frame house. But God had seen fit to lead them here—surely the ugliest, driest spot in all His creation.
Why, Lord? she asked, looking at the endless brown dirt.
And God, as He unfailingly did, answered her through Scripture her papa had taught her: Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord.
Kathryn felt a warmth and a relaxing inside, knowing that God had answered. And yet she was dismayed. She hated waiting. But it seemed she had little choice. “Where’s Uncle Isaiah? I thought he and Aunt Thelma would be here to meet us.”
Adam pushed his flat-brimmed, black hat back on his head and scratched his thin, pale brown hair—a feature his daughter had inherited. “Well, I thought so too. Something musta come up. It isn’t like my little brother to be unreliable.”
The August sun blazed. Kathryn wiped the perspiration off her forehead and frowned at the brown smudge it left on her glove. The dirt on the train had been bad enough—her gray serge suit was covered with smuts that had blown in the open windows from the coal-fired boiler. But always she had held in her mind a comforting picture of the green cropland and tree-surrounded farmsteads she thought they were going to.
“…water in Indian Creek much of the year, but when they get this proposed dam built the whole valley will spring up with farms. The soil’s rich—just needs water.” She had memorized Uncle Isaiah’s letter to her papa. “This project will bring in hordes of surveyors and construction workers and homesteaders—a field white unto harvest for your preaching, Adam. You can help me on my farm at first, but you’ll soon want to stake your own claim.”
Isaiah had gone on about the farming opportunities, but the line that had moved Adam was “We’ve got no preachers here closer than Boise City, fifteen miles to the northeast.”
Adam was a man of decision. His was a strength of spirit, not of body. The very next Sunday he had preached to his little congregation in Edgar on the text “How shall they believe unless they hear, and how shall they hear without a preacher?” and told them he and Kathryn would be leaving.
Kathryn thought about another text: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.” Well, her papa might have beautiful feet, but the mountains here were far in the distance. They looked cool and blue both in front of and behind her, but they provided little relief from the dust and 106 degree heat here. Kathryn had always hated being closed in—claustrophobic, Dr. Johns had said she was—but this seemed like too much openness to cope with. Would Papa really stay? There wasn’t a living soul here to preach to.
“Might as well sit a spell.” Adam picked up the biggest of their cases and shoved it over against the shack. Then he sat on the bare plank bench, which was fortunately on the shady side of the building. “Isaiah didn’t send no directions, else we could walk.”
Kathryn looked at the dust-covered toes of the high-top shoes sticking out beneath her skirt and was thankful for her uncle’s omission. She rummaged in her carpetbag and drew out a small, leather-bound book and pencil before she took her place on the bench.
Adam smiled at her. “Someday you’ll be mighty glad you kept that journal, girl. When I see you writin’ in it I often think how I wish my mama’d kept one when she and papa came over from Ireland after his textile mill burned.”
Kathryn smiled and nodded but didn’t really listen to the story she’d heard so many times before. Although she did wonder what her English grandmother, who had followed her Scots-Irish husband first to Ireland and then to Canada and on down to the Great Plains to homestead in a sod hut, would think of this. She had read Grandmother Eliza’s letters. How barren she had found the plains—how she had thought them brown compared to the soft greenness of her own land. Whatever would Grandma have thought of this?
Her thoughts turned to her own mama. Kathryn hadn’t minded leaving Nebraska too much, since Uncle Isaiah and Aunt Thelma were here in Idaho. Living with Aunt Thelma would be something like having the mother she’d never known. But she had hated leaving her mama’s grave in the tree-lined cemetery by the river. There had been tiny wild daisies growing all over it last week when she went to say good-bye. Ella Smith Jayne had died when Kathryn was five days old, so all she knew of her mama was the sepia photograph taken on the day Ella married Adam Jayne in 1883—nineteen years ago. The photograph and her grave were all Kathryn had.
Now she had only the photograph. Kathryn turned to write in her journal.
She had finished only five lines, however, when Adam stood up. “Ah, here he comes. I knew Isaiah wouldn’t let us down.”
Kathryn looked at the storm of dust approaching from the direction her papa was pointing. It seemed an enormous brown swirl for just a buckboard and team to be stirring up, but, as powdery as this ground was, she guessed that shouldn’t surprise her. She stood, shook her skirt out, and adjusted her broad-brimmed straw hat, preparing to wave to her aunt and uncle.
In a few minutes, however, her smile faded to a confused frown. A large brown coach with a team of eight horses thundered across the desert toward them. The driver pulled the stagecoach to a halt, and a violent fit of sneezing overtook her before she could get her handkerchief out of her reticule. The cloud of gray-brown dust rolled over them and on across the sagebrush.
A wizened little miner with skin like a piece of dried leather got off the coach. “Missed the train, have we?” He swore profusely when Adam told him that, indeed, he had. “Well, throw my bundles down,” he called to the driver. “It won’t be the first night I’ve spent in the open—nor the last neither.” He examined the schedule posted on the side of the building. “Mail train west tomorrer mornin’. Reckon that’ll do me.” He caught the bundles the driver tossed to him from the top of the stage.
Then Kathryn realized Adam was deep in discussion with the stagedriver’s assistant.
“Coach goes within hollerin’ distance of Isaiah Jayne’s place. It’s just a piece on up the road. Take you both and your luggage for thirty-five cents.”
Adam nodded and hoisted up his trunk. Relieved to be doing something, Kathryn accepted the assistant’s rawhide-gloved hand to help her inside the coach. She sank back against the leather seat with a sigh.
“And where might you going, pretty miss?” A laughing voice with a Scottish burr made Kathryn jump.
Coming into the shade of the coach from the glare of the desert sun, she hadn’t seen the two men sitting across from her. But she was spared having to answer by her papa, who followed her in.
Adam, always hoping for an opportunity to share the gospel, was good at engaging strangers in conversation.
He soon learned that the man who had spoken to Kathryn was Merrick Allen, that he had boarded the stage that morning at Idaho City, a prosperous gold-mining town in the mountains twenty miles above Boise, and was going to Silver City, an equally booming gold and silver mining town in the Owyhee mountains some thirty miles to the west. It was Merrick’s smooth appearance and well-cut clothes more than anything he said that led Adam to guess. “Gambling man, are you, Mr. Allen?”
Merrick threw back his head to laugh, knocking off his hat to reveal his thick black curls. Even in the dimness of the coach Kathryn could see how blue his piercing eyes were.
But then the coach wheels hit a rut in the sunken dirt road, and she had to clutch wildly to keep from being thrown off the narrow seat, so she missed most of his reply, except something about Lady Luck smiling on him more here than in San Francisco.
The small, red-bearded man beside him remained sullenly silent. His beady eyes made Kathryn shiver when they flicked over her.
When the coach righted itself and settled into its more usual bounce and sway, Kathryn nudged her papa. Why didn’t he say something about the evils of gambling? Mr. Allen looked far too fine a man to let go unwarned into eternal darkness. But then she looked out the side window where her father was gazing at a small brown shack with two unpainted wooden outbuildings and realized that the coach was slowing. Was this Uncle Isaiah’s place?
They climbed down, and moments later the stage rolled on with a shout from the driver and a snapping of reins, coating them with yet another layer of dust.
Kathryn felt even more desolate than before. This was a farm? Something seemed to be growing in the cleared field behind the shed, a cow stamped in the corral, and a few chickens scratched around the door of the shack, so she supposed it was a farm. But it was too quiet.
“Is this Uncle Isaiah’s, Papa? Where are they? Why isn’t Aunt Thelma out here to meet us?”
She hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle for two years, since they left Nebraska to move West. Working as a hired hand Isaiah couldn’t save enough money to buy his own place, and he was determined to have his own farm—his own land. So they had packed everything they owned, which was little enough, and headed West where, even in the new-turned twentieth century, a man could still stake a claim on a quarter section of land. If he irrigated and farmed it, it’d be his free and clear in five years. Just a little over three more years to go.
Kathryn shook her head. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like—what it was going to be like—living here. In all this time Uncle Isaiah had managed to clear and plant only one small field. And those brown-tipped leaves—were they bean plants?—hardly looked alive now.
“Why is it so quiet?” Kathryn’s voice was unnaturally loud, as if her insistence could call up an answer.
Adam shook his head and walked toward the house, not even bothering to carry his suitcase—the one with his Bible in it, which he had hardly let go of during the whole trip.
Kathryn followed with dragging feet. She didn’t like it. Something wasn’t right.
“Well, no sense in standing out here.” The hinges creaked as Adam pushed open the unlocked door. “I’ll start the stove, and we can make some coffee and biscuits while we’re waitin’.”
“Cook? In all this heat?” Kathryn was sure the temperature must have risen at least five degrees while they stood outside. But she didn’t argue. She was hungry. She took off her hat and suit jacket, hung them on the iron bedpost, and tied on an apron she found hanging on a nail behind the door.
Adam picked up a couple of sticks of gray, gnarled wood that reminded Kathryn of the driftwood she had sometimes gathered from along the Little Blue River in Nebraska. “Seems they’ve found something useful to do with this sagebrush.” But before he could get them in the stove they heard a strange humming sound outside the cabin, and a dark cloud shadowed the small window beside the stove.
Kathryn took two steps toward the window to see what was happening, then jumped back as the entire cloud swarmed down the stovepipe and into the room. She stifled her desire to scream as she realized the danger of opening her mouth. The air was full of tiny flying balls of soot. She swatted wildly and backed toward the door, emitting strangled cries from her sealed lips.
Suddenly the door swung open, and Kathryn backed into the solid form of Uncle Isaiah. The cloud fell lifeless, covering table, chairs, bed, floor, and people.
“What is it?” Kathryn leaned heavily against Isaiah’s strong arm supporting her around the waist.
“Flying ants. We get them almost daily during the hot season—about now—in the hottest part of the day.”
The floor crunched when Kathryn took a step forward. “Are they dead?”
“Yup, coming down the stovepipe they get covered with soot. It kills ‘em.” Isaiah pulled a broom and dustpan from behind the stove. “That way we don’t have to swat ‘em dead, but it’s a mixed blessing. Everything they touch gets covered with soot too.”
No one said another word while Isaiah efficiently swept up three dustpansful and dumped them outside the door. The chickens fluttered over, cackling and scratching. Isaiah turned back to the room, and then Kathryn saw how haggard and stooped he looked—anyone would have thought him five years older than Adam rather than the five years younger he really was at thirty-five.
Especially when compared to the frailer Adam, Isaiah had always seemed to Kathryn to be the epitome of strength with well-muscled, tanned arms and a long, firm jaw ending in a cleft, square chin. But now it was Adam whose energy seemed to be supporting the drooping Isaiah and Kathryn.
“Where’s Aunt Thelma?” Kathryn asked in a small voice that revealed the cold foreboding she suddenly felt. Then she noticed the band of black fabric around Isaiah’s arm.
Isaiah sank onto the saggy bed with a sigh. “Our little Josiah came two months early” He shook his head. “She had an awful time and it was all for nothing. The doctor came out from Nampa, but he couldn’t do anything.”
Kathryn stifled a sob and moved to her uncle’s side.
“I thought I’d have time to finish the burying and then meet your train—I didn’t forget you—but in this heat you can’t delay a burying.”
“Don’t you worry one bit about us, Isaiah.” Adam put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You weren’t all alone, surely?”
Isaiah shook his head of thick brown hair, cut square above his collar, but before he could reply they heard the clop of horses’ hooves and the creak of a buckboard.
A tall, thin man with a black moustache and a plump woman with blonde braids wound around her head came in laden with baskets of good-smelling food. They introduced themselves as Ned and Nelly Brewington, the Jaynes’ nearest neighbors, homesteading on the next section. They had gone to the cemetery with Isaiah, they explained, but had stopped back by their place to pick up the children and the food.
“This here’s Alvina—she’s almost fifteen. She’ll be company for you, Kathryn.” A tall girl with brown braids smiled. “David here’s eleven. Shake hands with the folks, Davey.” David wiped his sweaty palm on his overalls before he obediently stuck out his hand. “And Lucy’s eight.” Lucy bobbed her blonde curls. It was easy to see she took after her mama.
“Best neighbors God ever made,” Isaiah said. “Nelly kept me fed and Thelma comforted the whole time she was sick.” His empty eyes showed there was little that anyone could do to comfort him for his wife’s loss, however.
In a few minutes the table was covered with a clean cloth, Nelly having quietly discarded the soot-spotted one, and covered a fresh cloth with a platter of fried chicken, a big bowl of applesauce, green beans, and potato salad. Kathryn and Adam were given the two chairs in the room, Isaiah and Ned sat on stools, and the Brewington children crowded onto the bed while Nelly served everyone.
“This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten, Mrs. Brewington,” Kathryn said after her first bite.
“Call me Nelly. Everyone does. But that’s not chicken.”
“Long-eared chicken, you mean!” Davey laughed.
“Jackrabbit,” Alvina responded to Kathryn’s confused look. “It’s the only fresh meat we have in the summer— anything else spoils before we can get home with it from Nampa or Boise.”
Shadows stretched long across the desert, and the blue mountains turned purple, before the Brewingtons climbed back into their buckboard and rattled off across open land.
“Aren’t there roads?” Kathryn asked.
“There are, but it’s a lot longer going around the sections,” Isaiah replied.
When the company had gone the brothers spoke quietly about Thelma’s death, Adam offering what comfort he could.
I’d take it mighty kindly if you two’d go back to the cemetery with me tomorrow,” Isaiah said. “Ned prayed and read the Twenty-third Psalm over her grave, but I’d feel better to have a real preacher.”
Adam readily agreed. Then they turned to the still unpacked trunks and cases.
“I’ve just got one room back here.” Isaiah pulled a woven blanket away from a doorway at the back of the cabin. “But I divided it so’s you’d have some privacy.”
The room was long and narrow. Isaiah had made it into two cubicles, each just big enough for a single bed and a trunk, by stretching lengths of unbleached muslin floor-to-ceiling down the middle and tacking them in place with strips of lath. “Sorry. I know it isn’t what you’re used to.”
Kathryn was so exhausted after her days of travel and the strains of the past few hours that any bed looked palatial to her. “It’s fine, Uncle Isaiah, really. But there’s just one thing—I’m so terribly dirty. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could I possibly have a bath? If you could just set the tub out, I’d be glad to heat the water myself.”
Isaiah looked distressed. “I’m right sorry, Kathryn. But you see, we have to haul all our water in barrels from the Snake River—fifteen miles away, that is. We manage to keep the cattle alive and a small garden if we’re lucky—but water for a bath is an unheard of luxury.”
Kathryn settled for a small bowl of water and a sponge. The water was so dirty when she finished she couldn’t imagine its doing any good to the vegetables Isaiah asked her to pour it over.
When she stepped out the door she looked about in disbelief. First she noticed the chill. The temperature must have dropped forty or fifty degrees since the sun went down. The next thing was the silence. It had been quiet in Nebraska, but there were always crickets, frogs, night birds—comforting, melodious sounds to fill the night and make the dark friendly. Here there was nothing. No tiny creature rustled in the brush. No sound carried from a near neighbor. It was as if she had stepped off the face of the earth into a great void. Dauber, Isaiah’s horse, moved in the corral, and the noise startled her like thunder. She jumped back into the house and slammed the door.
“It’s so quiet!” Her own voice sounded as if she had yelled.
“Yup. Took Thelma a long time to get used to that too. Said she missed crickets more than flowers.”
“But why? You have those awful flying ants. Don’t you have any other insects?”
“Not unless you count jackrabbits. And the ants only come in the heat of the day. Nope, it’d be a good fifteen mile trip in the buckboard to get close enough to water to hear a cricket or a frog this time of the year. Of course, in the spring when there’s water in the creek we get a few. But it won’t be quiet all night. Soon’s the moon comes up you’ll hear plenty from the coyotes.”
It was a good thing he’d warned her. Kathryn was just drifting off to sleep when a blood-curdling howl brought her bolt upright. The shrieking yip-yip-yip seemed to come from right under her window. The cry was answered by another beast some distance away. Then another and another. How many were out there? It sounded like hundreds. Could the creatures get into her room?
Surely they would eat the animals in the corral before they’d break into a house to attack humans. It was hardly a comforting thought, but it gave Kathryn the courage to overcome her fear of being closed in enough to put her pillow over her head. She lay down again, but she didn’t relax.
This was the most awful place in the world. What could God have been thinking of to make anything so ugly? She knew it was wicked to question God, and she knew the pillow over her head couldn’t hide her thoughts from the Almighty. But she couldn’t help it. Silently she screamed at Him: Ugly, ugly, ugly!
And then she had an even more wicked thought—it was horrible to be glad Aunt Thelma was dead—but now surely Papa wouldn’t stay here. How could anybody live without water? Aunt Thelma was the lucky one—she had escaped. Kathryn shivered under her quilt at the thought— would she have to die to escape this place?
Another coyote howl tore through the dark, more piercing than ever. Maybe it would be worth dying to get out of here. Her pillow did little to muffle the sound. Would the shrieking and yowling keep up all night? Kathryn was just despairing of ever getting back to sleep when a deep, soothing voice came from the other side of the muslin wall. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
Kathryn slept.

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