By Dennis Klein

The wind blew hard and cold across the flat prairie.  Their stout log house stood up to the wind, but was unable to stop the drafts that that seeped into every crack and seam .  The blazing fire in the kitchen kept a small area marginally warm, but if one moved a small distance away from the flames, the cold took over and made you stiff and uncomfortable.  During the short, sweltering summers, you forgot about the cold because you were miserable from the heat, but a few months later, you were buried again in ice and snow.

The nearest neighbor, Ezra Kellog, was two miles away and the next one was another three miles further.   For days on end, Elizabeth would not talk to anyone outside her family, and she would often hear few words at all, except the whining and complaining of her young children. Her husband was a serious, hardworking, quiet man.  He rarely spoke except as a necessity to expedite the chores that made up their daily existence.  He was blunt in his demands and harsh in his criticism, rarely offering encouragement or praise.

He worked hard from dawn to dusk, their oldest son often by his side, but rarely seemed to enjoy the fruit of his labors.  He acknowledged the other children only to reprimand them, but he never laid a hand on them.  Every night, after finishing his inside chores, such as mending a harness or sharpening a scythe, he would read silently from the Bible, although he wasn’t one to quote from it.

Elizabeth’s days reeked of sameness, her daily obligations dreary and repetitious.  She tried to think forward to a time when things would be better, but she couldn’t see it.  Her youth, her optimism, and even her interest in life were slowly ebbing away with nothing to fill the empty place.

Holidays and trips to the nearby town to buy supplies were the only oasis in her arid, barren life.  They were her only opportunity to meet and talk with other people outside of her extremely limited circle.  She had once read of teeming cities in India and China where people were crowded together, living almost on top of each other, and she wondered why it had been portrayed as a tragic situation.  While she loved those brief interludes that broke up the mind numbing monotony of her life, she found it that much more difficult to return to her dreary situation when the too infrequent breaks were over.

When they had started their journey west, it was an exciting adventure, full of hope and promise.  They would live like gentry and rule the land and put forth a bounty that would feed the community and make them wealthy.  The reality failed to live up to the dream.  It was a constant struggle to coax a subsistence living out of the land, and their life lacked pretty much all of the attributes that she had looked forward to.  Her husband was a dullard whose aspirations lay more in farm implements and manure than in what she had thought were the better things in life.

She did have some respite when they came back from the trips to town.  Her husband would stop on the way back and buy some homemade whiskey from one of the distant neighbors.  For the next few days, he would drink off and on, and pretty much remain

in a stupor, going through the motions of completing his farm work, but getting  little done.

During these times, she would let the children play and she would walk down to the stream behind the house and would sit on the bank and read.  She would bring along some bread and cheese, forgetting about how dreary her life really was.  But she looked around her at the scattered families, and with few exceptions, saw the same pattern over and over.

So she made her decision and formulated her plan.  For months, she pilfered small amounts of money from her household fund and kept small amounts of the change when they went in town for supplies.  When she had saved enough, she made plans to go to Luke Barton’s farm to buy some whiskey, double the amount that her husband usually bought.

“I’m going to Flora Lindstrom’s house,” she told her husband.  “She’s with child and is having some problems.  I’m going to help her out.”

“Okay,” he answered absentmindedly, hardly even hearing her.

“I’ll be back before dark.”

She came home at the end of the day and brought the two bottles of liquor into the house.  Late that night, she showed it to her husband, telling him that the neighbor had given it to him as a gift in appreciation for her help.  When asked why the woman’s husband had not wanted it, she said that he had been ill and didn’t want to aggravate his condition.  She knew that he would have no occasion to speak to the woman’s husband in the next day or two, so she was not worried about her ruse.  As the evening progressed, her husband plunged into the liquor and drank far into the night until he fell asleep at the kitchen table.

The next morning, he woke up late and quickly did the minimum amount of chores that were required.  He then assigned his son to complete what had to be done to get them through the next day.  He then took what was left of the previous night’s refreshment and went to the barn.  He took up where he left off the night before, and by noon, was in a drunken stupor.

She called her eldest son over.  She knew she had to distract him while she made her move.  “Lucas, bring this note over to Emma Uding’s house and get some sugar for me.”

“What is it you want?” he asked peevishly, as impatient with her as her husband was.

“Just get it, please,” she answered in an unusually low, cold tone, forgetting whether she had written sugar or salt in the note.  He took the letter glumly and started for the Uding homestead.

She gathered the satchels of belongings and food that she had packed along with the rest of the money she had saved, and put them in the small wagon that they used to haul supplies.  She snuck one of the horses from the corral, although by now, her husband was quite unaware of anything going on around him.

She gathered her three young children.  Her oldest son was like his father and would be content to stay and eke out a living in this barren, lonely land.  Besides, if her husband had his son with him, he would be less likely to come after them and try to bring them back.

After hitching up the horse and loading the children in the wagon, she turned east and began her journey home.

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