Chapter 9

It took me a few seconds to grasp her meaning! Oh gods, I was going to be a father! She dove on my face and kissed me soundly. “Thank you, this is the best Saint Nicolas day present ever,” and she embraced me and I held her tight and felt her melt to me. “When’s it due?” I asked hesitantly, unsure how you can tell. “Early summer,” she replied, “I’ve been sure for a long while but wanted to keep it as a present for you. Some days I’ve been bursting to tell you!”

We had to kill and smoke the turkeys in hickory as we couldn’t keep feeding them our grains through the winter. They were a good size now. Mataoka thoughtfully suggested we capture a hen when the poults were a lot bigger this coming year, so we wouldn’t have to feed them so much, so early. We ate a lot of turkey and deer, and I went out to hunt a couple of times to restock our larder.

The winter seemed colder and longer than down on the frontier, and it was way into April before the melts came. I was glad we had built the house on a platform, slightly higher than the hill dipping down behind it, as the gully behind us became a torrent and, for several days, a stream ran between us and the outhouse. Mataoka and I struggled to push whellbarrows full of small round stones from the river through the deep, sucking mud and up around the wigwams to give us something hard to walk on.

It was the most marvelous feeling to notice the first light green buds breaking on the trees and feel the weak, first warmth of the spring sun on our faces. I looked around our valley and looked down at the bump Mataoka now cradled in her hands and felt a euphoria rise over me. Mataoka smiled up lovingly at me and our eyes met and we knew each other’s longing look and we scampered back into the warmth of the house to get naked and sticky again.

“Hello the cabin!” – the shout was outside, away, calling out to us. “Hello the cabin!” Mataoka stiffened warily in my arms and I quickly jumped out of bed and thrust and tugged my buckskins on. I went to the door and peered out.

There in the slush of the last of the snow stood two people, wrapped up, hands pulling blankets tight around themselves. They looked familiar. I blinked in the sunlight. My eyes adjusted and I realized who it was: pa and Eliza stood outside!

“It’s pa and Eliza!” I excitedly told my darling wife, who was sitting up in bed drawing the furs to cover herself. She relaxed, smiled, then beamed and started excitedly searching for her buckskin dress. Pa and Eliza gave us time to get presentable, then I beckoned for them to come on in.

Eliza rushed to Mataoka’s open arms and then rebounded as she realized the very large bump holding her apart from her friend. They laughed happily and the two girls quickly went into the house and the warmth, talking excitedly. Pa stood just in front of me, his hands by his sides, studying me, smiling. Instinctively I thrust my hand out to offer to shake his, and this jerked him out of his trance and he stepped forward and embraced me for a split second, before stepping back again and grinning. “Nice place you have here,” he conceded approvingly. And I realized how much I had needed to hear him say that.

I took pa for a quick tour of the farm. He squatted down to pick up clumps of the half-frozen soil and smelled it and ummpfhed and nodded. He looked at everything, from the irrigation we had arranged, to the rice pond, to the dams – and the errors. He laughed at our outhouse, and was impressed with our wigwams. He spent some time moving around the spare logs I’d split and staring down their lengths. “Good wood,” he said. He said not much else. He looked at everything.

“It’s a nice place you got here,” he finally summarized, standing by our front door and looking out east over our tilled land, the wigwams and turkey pen framing the sides of the view. I felt so proud that he was impressed with it all! “Not bad at all,” he added, and that was his way of saying it was really good.

“I worried you’d turn out bad,” he fixed me in his gaze and he looked concerned. “And you eloped with that squaw.” I just stared back at him, unable to speak, unable to defend myself. “But that wasn’t what it seemed, was it? Were you going to marry her proper if you hadn’t had to leave in a hurry?”

How to tell him that Mataoka had followed me? That I hadn’t known my own feelings until Mataoka bared hers?

“Yeah, I woulda,” I smiled, sure deep down that we would have. It would only have been a matter of time before Mataoka would have enlisted Eliza to suggest it to me and get that ball rolling. Yeah, deep down inside, I knew Mataoka and I would have married whatever occurred – even if that horrid day the bailiff came had never happened.

“Come on, we have a lot to get up the cliff,” he changed the subject and led me away to where he’d leaned a dead log against the cliff to be able to clamber up. Near the foot of the cliff, two mules were tied to bushes and were grazing on the dead grass and turf exposed by the melt. Near them were lots of packs.

I fetched my ladder from its hiding place and we quickly brought all the luggage up top and took it over to the store wigwam. There was a sack of potatoes and a small bag of wheat. There were more pans, knives and irons for lifting logs. A pulley and some rope would be invaluable. It was quite a treasure.

We went to join the ladies in the house. Pa took his time getting indoors, having first walked carefully all around the outside and examined the construction. Finally we went into the dark, warm inside.

Eliza and Mataoka looked up shyly as we entered. Had we caught them whispering naughty things? It sure looked like it. Pa stood with his cap in his hand just inside the door and looked around. Mataoka jumped up and came over, and pa took her hand and kissed it and announced he was pleased to meet Mrs Harvey Bolling in such a fine home. Mataoka’s cheeks burned with embarrassed happiness and she asked pa to call her Martha. Then pa joined me by the fire and we sat on one of the low benches I’d built, the ladies on the other and Mataoka making sure to push her dress down between her legs to protect her modesty – the short, loose, buckskin dresses she habitually wore rode higher now she had such a large tummy.

Eliza was rubbing her feet and, in the end, she plucked her boots off and exposed her blistered heels. The journey hadn’t been kind, and her feet were swollen and bruised, too. Mataoka ordered me to carry Eliza to the hot pool and promised to then treat the sores with her soothing balms. Eliza and pa hadn’t heard of our hot pool, but were soon enthusiastically heading towards it with us. Pa and I left the ladies to strip off and soak and I showed pa where I had got the logs for the house and how we arranged irrigation for the fields and other sights in that area while the girls bathed. Soon, the girls were ready for the next part of their care and they left pa and me to soak in the hot pool for a bit. Pa’s face as he eased into the pool with me was a picture of surprised bliss. Eventually we, too, left the pool and headed back to camp for dinner.

The expression ‘making the beds’ took a literal turn as Mataoka and I quickly built two Indian-style cots in the house. It was going to be weird sleeping with company and spectators, and Mataoka and I quietly teased each other, each claiming the other would force us into being naughty at night. I make no claim to being a saint and, with my wife whispering in Indian reminding me to keep quiet as she lined me up from behind her as she lay on her side, I could not keep down the urge to sate us both.

In the morning, the sun shone and it felt like spring was on the cusp. After breakfast, pa took me off to show me something interesting he had found in the valley below. We checked on the mules on the way past and they were fine. Pa pointed out some of the rock I had often walked past. “This,” he explained, “is iron ore. Good mountain ore. My folks used to mine this back in England. But this has got to be the richest ore I’ve ever seen.” He paused, breaking a bit off the crumbly rock. “Easy to get at, too. You know how to make iron?” And then he proceeded to instruct me.