The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive

Chapter 5

Six letters in six weeks.

That was the strange arithmetic of it — a courtship conducted entirely in ink, between a Boston which was too small for her and a Stone Creek which she had never seen, by a woman who had never been romantic and a man who had stopped being able to afford anything else.

Alice’s second letter had asked about the cattle operation, and he had answered in the patient detail of a man explaining his own workmanship. Her third had asked about winter temperatures and what she ought to bring west that she would not find in Stone Creek — and his list had stopped her short, because it began with things no advertiser would have thought to mention: salt: the price here is robbery; wool: three changes at least, and good boots; a stout sewing kit, though I am told the rail will bring your work with you. He had ended it, and bring nothing you value for sentiment. This country is hard on sentiment. What you value for usefulness, bring twice.

She had written back that if he thought a seamstress would cross the plains without her sentiment kit, he had underestimated his own advertised capability.

His fourth letter — the letter that would become, later, the letter she could recite from memory — began ordinarily enough. Answers to her questions about the county fair and the church and the physician’s hours, seven miles away, twice a week. Then the paragraphs at the end that he had not planned, the ones that surprised him when he reread them: the hill east of the house, the light in late afternoon, the grass that held color into November.

And, in the sixth letter, the train fare.

I enclose the ticket money and a little more — she could hear his voice in the plainness of it — for the things you decide at the last minute that you cannot leave behind. The train from Denver reaches Stone Creek on the branch line. The 14th of April is when I will be at the station. If the date does not suit, tell me now, and I will be at the station on whatever date suits you instead.

She signed her letters as she always did, Alice Hartley, with no added sentiment, because she had come to understand over six weeks that this was her version of sentiment: the absence of performance, the commitment stated plainly and left alone to stand for itself.

She read that sixth letter twice. Then she went and stood at her window over the shop — it was evening, and the harbor light was dying gold — and she thought about the walk along the Charles River that she had been taking since she was sixteen, the same turn at the same bridge, the same heron in the same reeds when the heron chose to be there. She had told him about that walk in the fourth letter, and she had told him she would miss it, and she had told him she was telling him not as a complaint but because she wanted him to know she was paying attention to what she was leaving, which meant she was paying attention to what she was coming toward.

He had not answered that letter until he had thought about it for two days.

What he had written back was one line, at the very bottom of the page, after all the facts: The hill east of the house at five in the evening in October is the thing I believe you will find most worth the trade.

She had read that line standing at the mail table in the shop with her hat still on, and the other girls had seen something happen to her face, and she had told them, with perfect composure, that she was going west in April, and the shop had gone very quiet, and then Mrs. Dodd had come out from the back room and had said, in the voice she used for measurements that had to be exact: Then you will take my patterns and my blessing, in that order.

She gave notice on a Monday. She packed Tuesday through Friday with the methodical cataloguing of a woman sorting her life: the useful things went in the trunk, the sentimental things went in a smaller box to be given to the sister in Ohio, and the things that were neither went on the table by the door for the girls in the shop. A suffering of small arithmetic decisions, each one a small goodbye.

On the Sunday before she left, she took the walk along the Charles one last time, the whole length of it, in a dress she would not wear on the train, and she stood at her bridge for a long time looking at the water, because what she was looking at was not the water.

Then she went home and mailed the reply that she had not needed to send — a single sheet: April 14. I will be on the train. — A.H. — knowing it would only reach him days after she did, wanting him to have it anyway, the way you tell a door thank you on your way out.

She wrote to her sister in Ohio the same night: I have been ready for a different chair for a long time. I am going to sit in this one.

When Alice Hartley stepped onto the platform at the Boston depot on the morning of the twelfth of April, 1882, she was thirty-one years old, she had never been west of Worcester, and she had a bandage on her left forearm that had not been there when she mailed the letter.