Darkness at Morning Star Read online

  On either side of the pharmacy entrance long, narrow windows framed enormous glass apothecary jars, one filled with a clear red liquid, the other blue, that shone like a maharajah’s jewels when illuminated by the midday sun. Even in summer, with the green-and-white-striped awnings cranked down to provide welcome shade, a luminous fire seemed to glow in their depths. Father Rogg was very proud of his windows: no dust, no cobweb wisps, not even a marring fingerprint was tolerated. I could not count the times I had polished and repolished those plate glass expanses to suit him.

  As I pushed open the door, the bell above it announced my overdue arrival. Ernest stood behind the counter polishing his spectacles. His neat white coat was as immaculate as always; the combed strands of his thinning hair lay across his domed pate as precisely as rows in a corn field. His head snapped up.

  “Considering the hour, I don’t know if it’s dinner or supper you’ve brought me.”

  “I’m sorry, Ernest,” I said, placing the basket on the counter. “I’ve had a busy morning,” I added as I offered my cheek for his damp kiss.

  “And do you suppose I’ve been idle, Serena?” he demanded, his polished jaws jiggling with indignation. “It’s been one thing after another all morning, ending with Jake Grimes insisting on showing me the boils the remedy I prescribed had failed to cure. Enough to take a man’s appetite clean away.”

  “It’s chicken potpie today, Ernest. Your favorite.”

  I lifted a dish from the basket and unwrapped the insulating napkin to release the tantalizing aroma of flaky-crusted chicken in a well-seasoned, creamy sauce. Ernest’s tongue darted wetly around his lips. For a man as slim as he was—I don’t know that I would have gone so far as to call him weedy, as Mrs. Mossbacher had—his appetite was awe-inspiring.

  “Shall I set it out in the back room for you?” I offered. “I thought today I’d join you.”

  Ernest coiled a protective arm around the fragrant dish. “I really doubt there’s enough for two—”

  “Oh, I’ve already eaten, Ernest,” I untruthfully assured him. “I just thought, with our wedding day so close... it’s not that I don’t value Mother and Father Rogg’s counsel, for of course I do, but there are a few things only we can decide.”

  I lowered my lashes with maidenly modesty. Ernest bustled to the front door, pulled the heavy shade and, after consulting his pocket watch, revolved the tin hands attached to the clock inscribed upon the window covering. “It’s half-past one, Serena. To accommodate you,” he announced importantly, “I’ll not reopen ‘til two.”

  Heaven only knows what he thought I had in mind, but my heart sank at the thought of his reaction at having sacrificed a half-hour of trade to discuss the possibility of a visit he was sure to think idiotic. I waited to speak until he had finished his dinner and was chasing a last crumb of crust through the remaining gravy.

  “A visit to Kansas?” he exploded. “With all there is to do in the few weeks left before our wedding? Abe Seligmann tells me you haven’t been in to order the bed linens even though the brass bed you wanted arrived from Albany a month ago! Whatever can you be thinking of?”

  “I thought maybe we could go there on our wedding trip, Ernest. Everyone goes to Niagara Falls ... maybe it would be interesting to do something different.”

  “Different? Well, Kansas would certainly be different all right! A dusty, flat wasteland instead of a renowned natural wonder? Sleeping in louse-ridden railroad way stations when we already have reservations at the grandest hotel in the Falls area? No thank you very much!”

  “Sybelle is my twin sister, Ernest. She’s my only kin! I haven’t seen her for ten years....” In the face of Ernest’s implacability, my voice trailed off in whispery despair. I might have had better luck wresting a bone from a bulldog than understanding from Ernest.

  He flicked crumbs from the corners of his set mouth, then slapped his napkin down on the deal table. “You’ve managed to survive the last ten years without seeing your sister. When you’re Mrs. Ernest Rogg, there’ll be more than enough to keep you busy and contented for the next ten.”

  I dropped my gaze to my folded hands in my lap. Busy, yes, but contented? Resigned was more like it. All at once I felt something hot and white begin to burn in my chest. Something more than resignation; bigger than resentment. Anger, that’s what it was. Anger undiluted by guilt or harnessed by common sense. Anger so strong I tossed the dishes, tableware and napkin higgledy-piggledy into the basket and scraped back my chair until it screeched in protest.

  “I’ve taken up enough of your valuable time, Ernest,” I said with a desperately achieved evenness. “There’s no more to be said on the matter.”

  “That’s my good girl!” Although his tone was lightly placatory, I didn’t have to see his face to be assured of the self-satisfied smirk on his lips.

  As I walked toward the door, he called after me. “Pull up the shade on your way out, will you, Serena? And stop in to see Abe about the bed linens before you go home. Time’s a wasting, you know!”

  His “good girl” was I? Instead of turning left into the dry goods store, I marched across the avenue and down toward the railway station. We’d see about that!

  My impulsive errand, once embarked upon, became a duty. That it was self-assigned did not in the slightest soften the grim determination with which I pursued it.

  I spent the rest of that fateful afternoon interviewing the stationmaster and doing certain investigations at the town’s modest library. In due course, the deep pockets of my skirt received for concealment three slim borrowed volumes and a packet of timetables with notations of railway fares, the amount of which made me feel quite faint. By the time I returned to the house on Maple Street, lavender shadows had invaded the dooryard, but Mother Rogg’s annoyance about my “gallivanting” was soon assuaged thanks to an embroidered version of my visit with Ernest. She, too, pronounced me a good girl, and I went to bed that evening feeling more wicked than I ever had in my life.

  How quickly I acquired a taste for wickedness! Over the next few days I stealthily assembled the clothes and few belongings that according to the old journals I had borrowed from the library, would equip me for life in Kansas. Day-to-day living may have become easier since the time of those early overland accounts, but progress could not eliminate altogether the hardships described. I regretted leaving my few bits of finery behind, but a prairie ranch ravaged by cyclones and blizzards was no place for furbelows. The wool mittens and scarf set Mother Rogg had knitted me for Christmas was more worthy of a place in my portmanteau than my Sunday-go-to-meeting lace collar and fancy clocked stockings.

  The day before my departure, I slipped my bag into a burlap sack and out of the house before the Roggs were astir. Later, I loaded it into an express wagon— rented for a nickel from the Candler boy down the street—along with Ernest’s dinner, which I delivered on my way to the station. Ernest, busy with a customer when I arrived, noticed neither the wagon nor the burlap sack, and none of the acquaintances I chanced to pass remarked upon it. By the time I consigned my portmanteau to the incurious stationmaster’s care and returned the wagon to its youthful owner, I decided that a successful life of crime, if one were bold enough, would not be nearly as difficult as I had once imagined.

  That night I lay awake, pinching myself when I felt my eyelids droop, until the snores from the adjoining room settled into the rhythmic rumbling of deep sleep. I donned the costume I had chosen for my journey, then slipped downstairs into the small room off the parlor which was used, in lieu of adequate space at the pharmacy, as an office. Once, when I had asked for part of the weekly wage Malcolm Wilcox paid me for cleaning his house, Father Rogg had marched me in, opened the wide drawer of his huge oak desk and showed me the flat tin box in which my wages were deposited. “For your dowry, Serena. You came with nothing, but you will have this to take with you.”

  I was aware the Roggs had every right to keep my wages as partial payment for my room and board, and except for
an occasional frippery denied, I never felt deprived. Indeed, after returning home, stimulated, from a day spent with Malcolm Wilcox, it seemed to me I owed him far more for the privilege of his company than I received for my housekeeping chores. For the hours spent at his bedside during his last weeks reading aloud passages from Shakespeare and Chaucer, I refused to accept anything. Be that as it may, when I opened the tin box and began to count out the bills stacked inside, I had to keep reminding myself that I had earned, them: twenty-five cents a day, three days a week for four years and three months.

  Count your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. A penny saved is a penny earned....

  Mother Rogg’s oft-quoted proverbs marched through my head as I flicked the bills through my fingers. Twenty-five ... fifty ... one hundred ... one hundred and sixty-five dollars! I could hardly believe it. Did I dare? Did I really dare? I swallowed hard, patted the bills into a neat bundle and secured it with a length of stout string. Better me than Ernest Rogg.

  Before returning the box to its accustomed place in the back of the desk drawer, I placed in it the note I had written earlier, expressing gratitude for the shelter Mother and Father Rogg had provided and regret for abusing their trust. As I eased open the back door, Mother Rogg’s sleek black-and-white cat slipped through, pausing briefly for a purring arch against my ankle.

  “Goodbye, Sugar,” I whispered. He would, I realized sadly, be the only member of this family I would miss, and not even him very much. I stepped out on the porch. The morning light had not yet begun its pearly advance above the horizon. A cardinal called tentatively from the quince bush, pink-budded now, grown from a cutting given me by Mrs. Mossbacher. I would never see it in bloom again. But there would be prairie flowers blooming in Kansas, and who was to say the songs of the birds they sheltered would fall less sweetly on my ear?

  I set my chin resolutely, patted my bill-stuffed, needleworked bag and set off down the path. Above me I glimpsed the morning star, bright symbol of my journey’s end, and as I latched the gate behind me, Mother Rogg’s high-pitched voice echoed in my head. The Lord helps those who help themselves, Serena—my footsteps quickened—and don’t you ever forget it!

  Chapter Two

  The Albany train was late. I took advantage of the delay to send oft my wire to Belle, looking nervously back over my shoulder toward the street as the operator tapped out the words I had composed during the night. At length, I heard with relief the approaching chug of the engine. The only caring witness to my steam-wreathed departure was the stationmaster’s mournful-eyed hound, who, grateful for a rare petting, relinquished my company reluctantly.

  My memory of the next few days is a muddle of excitement and misery. From a girl cautioned never to exchange glances, much less words, with strangers of the opposite sex, necessity soon transformed me into a bold young miss forced to seek advice and services from men of all classes and colors. Indeed, it was a spit-and-polished young Negro porter in Chicago who kindly pointed out what I should have had sense enough to realize on my own.

  Faced with a one-night layover and confused by the profusion of hotel advertisements posted in the vast, noisy, smoke-filled station, I turned to the first uniformed, official-looking person I saw, trotting alongside his loaded baggage cart to a side entrance where he raised a long chocolate-colored finger to point out a hotel he considered suitable for a lady traveling alone in modest circumstances. His eyes widened as I rummaged among the dwindling bills in my purse for a coin with which to thank him.

  “Lordy, miss! You gon’ lose that for sho, ‘less you hide it. They’s sharp eyes allus lookin’ for easy takin’s.”

  The journey from Chicago to Leavenworth, and from there on the Kansas and Pacific Line to Ellsworth, bore him out. Both trains were crowded with immigrants lured by the promise of cheap farmland, and coins I could ill afford to lose were twice extracted from my purse during the hectic rush to the railway restaurants for the twenty-minute meal stops allotted. I had, thank heaven, pinned what remained of the paper money to my camisole.

  The train’s hard, wooden coach benches seemed designed more for punishment than ease. The loose-fitting windows offered little protection against the soot and cinders, and the clangor of the train’s progress over rough roadbeds was augmented by the wailing of the immigrant families’ children. The frightened eyes of those poor little dispossessed strangers reminded me that this must have been the route—perhaps the very coach!—that Sybelle, too, had taken. The thought put my own discomforts in perspective. Calmer of mind, I allowed my head to sink upon the pillowy shoulder of the immensely large woman who, close-braced against me, was already asleep.

  I was awakened, and in truth all but thrown to the dusty floor, by the jarring thud of the stop at Abilene, my next to last. This time I did not bother to join the stampede into the restaurant. My heightening excitement and the bawling of the poor creatures bound east for slaughter from the nearby cattle yards combined to rob me of my appetite. I did, however, employ the time to seek out the washroom where, in relative privacy, I washed my face and hands, tidied my hair, adjusted my bonnet and brushed off my sadly disheveled, button-trimmed tan serge suit as best I could.

  Heaving and steaming like some great prehistoric beast, the train paused at Ellsworth just long enough to allow for an exchange of passengers before resuming its lumbering way west with a snort of steam and scream of whistled rage. One of the disembarked passengers, a salesman by the sample case he carried, strode off toward the hotel; another, an older woman dressed in widow’s weeds, was borne off with hugs and kisses by a wagon load of kinfolk of assorted ages. Was it a long-awaited visit, I wondered, or had she been pressed to spend her sunset years with her children and grandchildren? Would she be happy? Would I?

  I waited with my bag on the platform, not knowing what to expect; not even knowing, since I didn’t know if my wire had arrived, if I was expected. The town, what I could see of it, was dispiritingly bleak. Dust swirled in the wake of buggies and wagons; the awnings, even the leaves of the few scraggly trees, were caked with it. I sighed. My eyes darted from side to side hoping to catch a gleam of silver hair.

  I stepped back into the shade, and as I did so a voice rasped behind me, “You be Miss Garraty? Miss S’rena Garraty?”

  I whirled, startled, to find a bent, wizened little man peering up at me from under the brim of what must have been the dirtiest, most misshapen hat in creation.

  “Them eyes is the same,” he muttered. “You must be her.”

  I stared down at him, not sure whether to be indignant or amused.

  “The name’s Cobby, ma’am. Cobby Hawley. I’m here to take you to Morning Star. That yourn?” he inquired, aiming a stubby finger at my bag.

  “Yes, Mr. Hawley.”

  He grunted and picked up the bag. “Cobby’ll do.”

  As I was soon to learn. Cobby Hawley’s few words to me that afternoon were for him a positive torrent of communication. I trailed after him to a wagon loaded with sacks and boxes and kegs of every size and description. Two horses drowsed in the traces, but no silver-haired girl smiled down at me from the narrow, high plank seat.

  I tried to hide my disappointment from this grizzled stranger. “My sister didn’t come with you, then?” I asked.

  Cobby wedged my bulging bag in the remaining comer.

  “No room,” he said, as he slung a worn canvas over the pile of supplies. “Comin’ in, mebbe, but not goin’ back.” His inflection made it clear that anyone with a brain in her head should have been able to figure that out on her own. I didn’t care. “No room” was better than “hadn’t a mind to.”

  He finished tying down the canvas, then gave me a hand up and waited impassively for me to settle myself down next to him on a seat just wide enough, I now realized, to accommodate two. He then plucked a corncob pipe from the pocket of his fringed, greasy leather shirt, clamped it upside down between his teeth and urged the horses into a smart trot with a slap of the reins across
their broad backs.

  The damper having been put on further idle conversation, I contented myself for the next hour or so by observing the surroundings. Once we were beyond the town and the dust cloud that hung above it like a miasma, the first thing that struck me was the size of the sky. I’d never seen a sky so big, so wide, so blue. Could this vast azure dome be the same sky that skulked behind trees and peeked over the hills back East?

  The wagon dipped sharply down into a gully, at the bottom of which sheltered a stand of tall, rough-barked trees. I smiled at the sight of their arching limbs, thick-clustered with large, trembly green leaves, but as we gained the other side I looked back, puzzled, suddenly realizing that back East there would have been a stream purling through a dip like that; here there was only the shadow of a watercourse traced in sand.

  “Mr. Hawley ... Cobby? Where’s the water?”

  His eyes slid toward me, squinched almost shut, and slid back. He pulled his corncob pipe, reluctantly, from his mouth. “Comes and goes.” Back popped the pipe, as if to plug a leak.

  The horses trotted on, the wagon rattling behind them like a barrel of tin cans tied to their tails, but I was hardly aware of fatigue or hunger or the sun beating down on my head. The town of Ellsworth had long since dropped out of sight. The prairie now stretched out around us in all directions, not flat, as I had been led to believe, but in great waves of grassy earth, an inland ocean whose crests, foamed with yellow and lavender flowers, undulated to the horizon.

  I threw back my head and took a deep breath. The air was redolent with a clean, spicy aroma reminiscent of the wormwood in Mrs. Mossbacher’s herb garden. Could those gray shrubs, whose spiky branches occasionally fell victim to the revolving wheels, be the sagebrush I had read about? As I leaned out and down to pluck off a tip, I felt bony fingers clutch at my arm.