Hand to the Plow
By Ilene H. Kingsbury
Part II – A Question to Be Answered
Synopsis: A Welsh widow on her way to the valleys of the mountains in 1864, with her family of five children, pauses in a railway station in Philadelphia, awaiting a train to take them westward. For a compelling reason, the emigrant wishes to stop at a small town in Pennsylvania.
The emigrant was stunned. The ceaseless speech of this man, who was the pattern from whom all future talkative railroaders was cut, bewildered her. Her heart raced with his words across the back of his imaginary map, and already she felt that trudging feet and burdened shoulders were the chief requisites of land travel. At her back was an ocean, ceaselessly rolling. It had consumed nearly seven tossing weeks of life. Fearsome as were the deeps of the sea to a land-reared woman, still more terrifying and confusing, now, was this proffered continent of thousands of miles of earth stretching to the valleys of the mountains where refuge was assured. But the hegira of getting to that haven was so uncertain, so mystifying, that the emigrant was led to question her momentous decision to transplant herself on the other side of the earth from that of her birth.
Last spring, in South Wales, no one had painted this picture of railroads with varied placed rails and cooking stoves in each car, and soldiers running one’s children out to a bush for concealment from the wind. The American Civil War, between the North and the South, had been mentioned only casually. Surely the war was not near her path to the great rivers and the high mountains. She had concluded that as long as the South was the rebel in the affair, that the North had marched deep in and had thus protected her route to the Rockies. A vague impression had been left with her that this rebellion had taken on the aspects of guerrilla warfare, was a hit-or-miss affair, and would certainly be out of her way by the summer of this year, 1864.
How mistaken she was. Although spokesmen in the emigration department referred to this as the last year of the war, and not as the fourth, how were they to be certain of that word last?
A week ago, back in Castle Gardens, while they explained to the uniformed emigration authorities about where they were from and where they were going and how many there were of them, and how old they were, and how it was that she had no husband to protect her, and how it was that they spoke English, while claiming Welsh nationality, all was confusion.
In the midst of this, a side conversation was indulged in which gave her restless nights and uneasy days. Her informant had called this conflict a blood-brother war. He said that fathers and sons met on battlefields and took each other’s lives. He described the burning of a great valley where dogs crept away to die, and where refugees had swarmed out of reach of the flames as cattle will stampede before a prairie fire. The emigrant had shuddered, but had relented the day she had promised her dying husband to begin, and finish, their journey to America without that strong arm she had leaned on since bridehood. To come to a war was not what she had dreamed of for a dozen years. But it was too late now to turn back. Even her sixteen-year-old Eliza vowed that she would rather die in a war than sail a stormy ocean in constant peril. The course now was to traverse this scene of contention, to get to the other side of the continent, even though plains and Indians and a bloody war interposed the way.
Upon her insistence that she wanted tickets for as far west as the agent’s line could carry them, he took her money and gave her a piece of square cardboard upon which was a picture of a railroad engine and a few initials which denoted ownership of the same. She thoughtfully placed the ticket in a drawstring bag of smallish size, a homely thing that never left her person, and turned in the indented tracks in the wooden floor to join her children huddled near their pile of miscellaneous property.
At that moment the ticket agent remembered something she had asked about, a little town in Pennsylvania called Bradys Bend. He hadn’t answered her about it, especially as she had added that she wasn’t really going there anyway. So now he raised his voice and called to her, and to get her attention, he barged on as at first.
”That town now. My cousin’s daughter used to live there. Not much of a place, one might gather. Just coal people and a railroad to carry off the coal, and more smoke than healthy people should be breathing. Not many people live there, either. Mostly a foreign town, Welsh. Mostly hadn’t bothered to speak English since coming over from the old country. Say, know anyone there, lady?”
He never ceased his talking. His questions were not meant to be answered. He was indeed the original information bureau of the railroads.
However, the emigrant did venture one more question. ”How far will we be from Bradys Bend if we stay on this train?” she quietly asked. Her tone almost stopped the agent, for she had turned squarely toward him and was so quiet that he believed she wanted a quiet answer. In fact, she raised a finger to her lips to hush him in his reply.
And because he was brash and insensitive to delicate signals, let alone this universal one to talk softly, he said in his usual station voice, as if talking to deaf people, “Well, lady, I’d say it was about twenty-five miles from where you will be when you reach Pittsburgh. That is as the cow flies, but a little farther along the Allegheny River. That’s how the town got its name, because of the bend in the river.”
The emigrant could stand no more. She wished she could faint dead away rather than hear one more word about Bradys Bend.
At her leaving him, the agent shrugged a little, and clicked his tongue and thought about how many funny people came by his window in the station. And the questions they asked, too It would seem as though if one asked a question, one would at last stay long enough to get a civil answer.
The emigrant dragged herself toward her little brood. She noted that the little one was already asleep with her head in the lap of her bigger sister. The three boys stood up as she came near and were straining to get on the way now that the ticket was purchased. Even before she reached them, they considered themselves dismissed from their temporary vigil as guards to their sisters, and without waiting for permission, they threaded their way out of the station. Through the door she saw them leap off the platform and sprint down the street, each trying to outdo the other in speed and form. They would be back in a moment with questions, but for now they must run off their spirits, already too pent-up for comfort.
She counted the property, just from habit, threw a shawl over little Sannie, and sat on the bench just vacated by the boys. Eliza, the teenage daughter, unable to move lest she awaken little Sannie, was started to hear her mother say determinedly, “No, I cannot do it!”
(To be continued)