Make Me a City Read online

  Miss Chappell—and he could hardly bear to tear his eyes away from her—explained that her friend John Wright was often writing letters to the Chicago Democrat and he wanted to inform readers about Mrs. Eulalie’s grandfather and correct the claim that Mr. Kinzie’s father had been the first settler.

  Uneasy about the direction of the conversation, John spoke up at the first opportunity. “Miss Chappell told me,” he said, “that you would like to have this back.”

  He watched their faces as Mrs. Eulalie unwrapped the picture.

  “But how did you persuade Mr. Kinzie to sell?” asked Miss Chappell.

  John smiled. “He thought Mr. Beaubien was the buyer.”

  Mrs. Eulalie wanted to pay for it, but he would not accept anything. “From what Miss Chappell has told me, it should not have remained in the house in the first place.”

  “My grandfather,” replied Mrs. Eulalie, still gazing at the picture, “was a great collector. We took twenty-seven paintings with us to St. Charles. This was the only one Mr. Kinzie refused us. Probably, he liked to tell visitors he was the man sitting on the porch.” She examined the writing at the bottom. “And it was the first.”

  John frowned. “I don’t follow you, ma’am.”

  “What it says. The First Mansion at Echicagou.”

  “Ah, yes. A pity the signature isn’t clear.”

  “I think it was done by a French visitor,” said Mrs. Eulalie. “I remember my grandfather complaining how long he had to sit in the chair smoking his pipe while the man painted.” She turned to him. “Thank you.”

  John, his confidence restored, resisted glancing again at Miss Chappell. He started asking Mrs. Eulalie questions about life in the old days, and why they had to leave. He included a few stories of his own. Perhaps he said more than he should have done, and asked too many questions. Mrs. Eulalie soon seemed to tire of them. She stood up, saying she needed fresh air.

  Miss Chappell was on her feet next, offering to accompany her.

  John was left with little option but to offer to rewrap the painting, and leave it for Mrs. Eulalie in the safekeeping of Mark Beaubien.

  A few moments later, he was on his own again in the virtually empty tavern. The lone figure on the bench in front of the fire was still asleep. There was no sign of Mark.

  He looked out the window. The steamer had docked at the pier; a crowd was gathered around as Negro porters scurried up and down planks, boxes and crates strapped to their backs. Miss Chappell and Mrs. Eulalie were walking in the other direction, toward the bridge. Miss Chappell was the smaller figure. Even from here he could detect the briskness in the short steps she took. He watched them, regretting that he was not included in their party. He thought of some of the things he had wanted to say to Miss Chappell. And he wondered when he might get another chance.

  * * *

  It only takes one stone to start an avalanche. That was the thought that crossed Eliza’s mind as they walked beside the Lake. Discussion with Mr. Wright seemed to have dislodged something in Mrs. Eulalie. Her customary reticence was gone. She wanted to talk about her childhood at the house, about all sorts of things—the bread they used to bake, the hens in the backyard, the journeys she took with her grandfather.

  She had spoken of many things by the time Eliza asked the question that would change her mood, if not her willingness to talk. “So this is the first time you have returned to Chicago since then?”

  Mrs. Eulalie shook her head and paused. She pursed her lips. With studied determination, she now began to speak about something very different. She had witnessed, she said, the fall of Fort Dearborn in 1812. She began to talk about her husband, Isaac, how brave, handsome, kind and learned he was. “He was the doctor,” she said, “and a poet. And a lunatic, of course, to love me.” Eliza reached across and took hold of her sleeve, as Mrs. Eulalie’s voice choked.

  “Good men can be so hard to find,” she remarked.

  After a moment’s reflection, Mrs. Eulalie turned to face her. “Tell me. Have you had many dealings with doctors, Miss Chappell?”

  “More than I care to remember.” She grimaced. “Bloodlettings, blistering, purges. Calomel. The scars on my back still trouble me.”

  “You remember I told you once my son was born in New York? You asked me why, and I didn’t tell you. After Fort Dearborn, you see, I went to my grandfather’s house in St. Charles.”

  Eliza wondered how she had managed to escape from Fort Dearborn but dared not ask. At least, not yet.

  “My grandfather was a good man, and he thought everyone else must be good too. That was the weakness in him. He saw the evil in other people too late. It happened like that with Mr. Kinzie. It happened like that with”—her eyes watered—“a cousin of mine. Anyway, my grandfather, he paid for the best doctor in St. Charles. That’s what he thought.” She paused, biting her lip.

  Eliza waited. When it became clear Mrs. Eulalie would say no more, she finished off for her. “And it happened like that with him too?”

  “Yes, that’s a way of putting it.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Isaac had taught me the Indian cures, so I decided if I was ever getting the chance, I’d try to be a doctor myself one day, even if I don’t have the book learning for it.” Something, at that moment, caught her eye. She halted. “That’s elk root,” she said, pointing to a sturdy green plant with purple petals and a rosy-colored floret. “When elks are injured, that’s what they chew.” She bent down, withdrawing a knife from her bag, and cut the root deep down in the earth. Holding it up triumphantly, she shook off the soil. “Mixed with alcohol, this will be helping your back.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Mrs. Eulalie gave a weak smile. With the Lake behind them, she led the way along a beaten path that wound its way over some sandhills toward a copse of trees.

  “So you left St. Charles to have your baby in New York?” asked Eliza.

  “Isaac had given me a letter to send to his father. If anything happened to him, he asked that the family should look after me.”

  “He knew about the baby?”

  She shook her head. “I was going to tell him. But then”—her eyes seemed to glaze over, lost in recollection—“Mrs. Heald was calling for Cicely and me. We had to run.” She sighed. “No, I never told him. I didn’t want to go to Fishkill. But there was nothing my grandfather could be doing to stop him. He was old by then, walking on two sticks. And Mr. Van Voorhis was a big man, and white, and a judge.”

  “He was good to you, Isaac’s father?”

  She shook her head. “He thought I was touched. Once baby Isaac was birthed, they sent me back to St. Charles.” She swallowed. “I never did know what they told him about me. I went to Fishkill once, soon after, but the family had moved to New York. I never saw him again.”

  Eliza, who did not know what to say to that, opened her arms wide and drew Mrs. Eulalie into an embrace. The poor lady tried, at first, to resist. Eliza had never seen her in such a state before. She was trembling; her breath was agitated. She would write to F____ as soon as they got back. Sentences began to run through her head. Though neither you nor I have yet been blessed by motherhood, can we not feel in the very core of our beings how agonizing such a loss must be, how it would feed like a canker on our hearts, how it would imperil our sanity?

  Mrs. Eulalie pulled away. “Maybe I should learn to speak more like that, Miss Chappell,” she said, “for the good it does me.” She brushed down her skirt. “I always was a quiet one, even as a young sprout.”

  For some minutes, they walked on in silence. Eliza glanced across at her from time to time, but could not read her expression. Those raw emotions, briefly displayed, seemed to be back under control.

  They stopped in front of an enormous cottonwood tree. Devoid of leaves, there was a somber grandeur in its sheer size. Beyond a natural hollow at its roots stood a patch of wooden crosses. Mrs. Eulalie stepped forward, plucked the flower from the elk root she had gathered, and placed it at the
base of one such cross, before standing upright, with her head bowed. Eliza kneeled on the cold, hard ground. She prayed in silence for Mrs. Eulalie’s lost husband, and for all those souls that met their Maker on that fateful day.

  Then she began to pray aloud. She asked that God, in his infinite mercy, might pardon all those who had transgressed against Him, however heinous their crimes.

  Mrs. Eulalie interrupted. “You can’t be saying that, Miss Chappell.”

  “Mercy is hard,” she reminded her, “but without it we are lost. Utterly lost.”

  “You don’t know. You wasn’t there.”

  * * *

  On the way back to town, Eliza asked Mrs. Eulalie for her impressions of Mr. Wright. She told herself she was simply trying to create some distraction. Deep down, though, she could not deceive herself. She was keen to talk about Mr. Wright and eager to hear what Mrs. Eulalie would say about him. The older woman, for all her reserve and contradictions, seemed to be possessed of a hard-earned wisdom. And although Mrs. Eulalie continued to reject Eliza’s attempts to bring her to the Lord, she carried herself with an undeniable grace. The confidences she had shared today filled Eliza with hope that she would yet be able to succeed where Reverend Porter had not.

  Mrs. Eulalie was very grateful, she said, to have the picture. How thoughtful of him. What a sympathetic young man he was. “Make sure you don’t go hiding from your own heart, Miss Chappell,” she said, “’cause love never comes twice. Take it from one that knows. It’s clear as day, you have destiny with Mr. Wright.”

  * * *

  It had been raining, on and off, for days. But today the heavens opened even wider and great torrents cascaded from the sky. It rained and rained and rained as never before, in all the time John had been in Chicago. There was no wind, and only occasional bouts of distant thunder. Not once had the downfall eased. Big drops bounced like balls. It was impossible to raise your head as you walked, or to see farther than a few feet ahead, or to find the boardwalks even in those few streets where they were laid. A stranger would have had no idea where he was, nor any chance of finding out. State Road was a mud bath, full of hidden ditches and floating debris, and by the time John waded around the corner into Clark Street, he counted himself lucky to have arrived there with his shins intact and without having fallen headlong in the filth. He climbed the three steps onto the new deck. The lock turned easily. He went inside.

  The schoolhouse was almost complete, and he had come to deal with the leakages that such tremendous rainfall would have caused. He inspected each of the three rooms and was delighted to find everything quite dry. The roof was watertight, the seals on the windows and shutters were sound, and at neither door had anything seeped inside. Joseph Meeker had done an excellent job. Even in The Prairie Store, built with such care and attention to detail, they had not escaped a few leaks. He paced around, prodded here and there, and ran his fingers over the joints and seams. Removing his greatcoat, he hung it from a hook beside the front door and positioned a bucket beneath to catch the drops. Unbuttoning his gaiters, he balanced them on top of the bucket before easing his feet free from their boots. With a dust cloth, he wiped them dry. The rain continued to hammer down on the roof and he was shivering. Going into the back room, he knelt in front of the fireplace and laid kindling. That would be the final test of Mr. Meeker’s work.

  It did not take long for the fire to take hold. As he worked some warmth into his fingers and held his sleeves forward to dry them out, he recalled once more the circumstances of his last marriage proposal. And he speculated as to when and how he might try again. First, he would need to do something about the anti-slavery society he had promised to establish. He wondered whether he could find a way out, or a reason for further delay. At least he had done what he could with the letter about Chicago’s first settler. It was a relief that the Chicago Democrat declined to publish it.

  When he was feeling warmer, he went into Miss Chappell’s new study in the back extension and picked up a few of the journals arranged on her desk. He returned to the back room and unrolled an Indian mat in front of the roaring fire. After raising each foot to warm it through, he sat down. And with the rain pounding on the roof, the flames and heat felt like a little miracle. There was no rush to get home. He flicked through the journals and, after browsing a few articles, he settled on one about a new type of fence in a journal called The Horticulturalist.

  As he read, he was reminded of a conversation he had once held with Miss Chappell about the need to encourage farming on the prairies. “What about herds of marauding buffaloes?” she had asked. “To keep them out would need a very strong fence, much stronger than any of the fences used out East.” She advised him, tongue in cheek, to hold off from becoming a farmer himself until such a fence had been discovered. He continued to read, with mounting excitement. The writer was describing a kind of mulberry tree, commonly known as the Osage Orange in Arkansas, with branches that were formed of a notably strong and springy kind of wood and the trees (this was the sentence that caught his eye) “when set at a distance of fifteen inches asunder, make the most beautiful as well as the strongest hedge fence in the world, through which neither man nor animals can pass.”

  He was so enthralled, and the fire was bathing him in waves of such luxuriant heat, that he barely noticed the door opening. He became aware of a draft only because it sent the flames in the hearth even higher.

  He turned to find, standing in the doorway, dripping wet, Miss Chappell.

  “I apologize. I was not expecting…”

  “Nor I,” he said, rising from the mat. “Please…” He beckoned, inviting her to come near the hearth. “You must be wet through and frozen.”

  Indeed, she was shivering so much she could not undo the ties to her bonnet. “I am very h … happy to see a fire.” He had never heard her stammer before.

  He watched her fingers grapple with the ties for as long as he could stand. “May I?” he said, stepping forward.

  “It’s new,” she said, “and too tight.”

  It was certainly tight beneath her chin, and his fingers had never been particularly nimble. He tried not to touch her, for the sake of propriety, but he could not help it. Their proximity was an embarrassment. He caught a waft of her warm breath. She avoided looking up at him. He made a joke about his clumsy fingers. She said he should cut the ties, if he could not undo them. He said he wouldn’t hear of it. He wasn’t that clumsy. He shifted a little closer. He wanted to lean still farther forward, feel the rise and fall of her bosom against his chest. They were only a few inches apart. It could appear unintentional, a mistake, and if she objected she could always pull back and they could pretend it had never happened.

  The knot came undone.

  He stepped back. She shook out her hair. He took the sodden bonnet, of a rather fine dark velvet material, and hung it on a hook to the side of the fireplace. “Terrible weather. The rain,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed, looking around. “I was expecting a disaster.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve checked. Mr. Meeker has done a fine job. There are no leaks. Please,” he said, “try to warm yourself and dry out.”

  Her skirts were soaked and had quite lost their shape. There was a dazed expression on her face. For once, she did not seem to know what to say.

  Nor did John. “You could say Mr. Meeker has fenced us off,” were the words that came out of his mouth.

  “Fenced us off? From what?”

  “It was intended as a joke,” he blundered on, “meaning he has fenced us off from the rain.”

  “Ah.”

  He hastened to explain himself. “I have just been reading … er…” He indicated The Horticulturalist. “Do you remember what you once said, about herds of marauding buffaloes?”

  He talked fast and felt he wasn’t making much sense, but he did his best to explain why the Osage Orange plant would make a perfect fence, while helping to remove her overcoat, and he noted the pale blue color of her
skirt, which he didn’t remember having seen her wear before, and he brought through the other three chairs from the office and before long they had arranged everything so that their two coats were spread over the chairs to catch the heat, and their hats were hanging from nails beside the fireplace and he was regretting the fact that there was no means of making coffee. She was looking more relaxed now. How fine it would have been, to sit there with Miss Eliza Chappell, drinking coffee together, dry and warm in a world of their own, as the rain thundered down.

  He put on another log, and stoked the embers.

  “I love fires,” he said.

  “You have built a very good one,” she said as she held up the hem of her skirt to the heat.

  “Mind the sparks,” he warned. He swallowed. “I must apologize,” he said, “for the way in which I questioned Mrs. Eulalie at the Sauganash that day.”

  She told him not to worry. “Your questions, actually, were helpful. They seemed to put Mrs. Eulalie in a talkative mood.”

  He should have stepped back; he should have given her more space. It would have been the courteous thing to do. There were damp patches on her pale jacket, which matched the skirt, and he noted how that dampness clung to her bosom.

  His eyes were looking straight into hers. He asked more questions about Mrs. Eulalie, but he was only doing it to make conversation.

  “She is very grateful to you,” she said. “That picture is now on the wall of her room at the Sauganash.” She made as if to move away.

  He should give her space. “Miss Eliza…?” His voice sounded gruff, broken and strange. And he was feeling off balance. He was leaning toward her, his hands were on her upper arms and he squeezed soft flesh beneath. Her hair was glossy, and her cheeks flushed in the firelight.

  “Are you well?”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Quite well.”