The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

The Letter From The Missouri Country

In the spring of 1822 a letter came to the store with my name on it, and Captain Doak’s clerk held it two weeks because he could not credit that anybody would be writing to me.

It was from Esther. She was sixteen. The hand was small and even and it slanted the way I had taught her to slant it, and there was not one word misspelled in three pages, and I sat down on the step outside the store and read it there because I could not wait to get home.

She told me about the country. She told me her mother was well and was running a household of eleven people, most of them not her own. She told me the winter had been hard and the spring was good.

And at the bottom she wrote that her mother had told her to put in that the corn was in and there was plenty of it, and that I was not to read anything into that.

I laughed out loud on the step of that store, and the clerk came to the door to see what was the matter with me.

I wrote back. We wrote for eleven years and then the letters stopped, and I do not know why they stopped, and at my age I have stopped assuming the worst about every silence.

I am seventy one years old. I have the three pages in a tin with my marriage lines and Josiah’s discharge.

And what I would want said, if anybody is going to say anything about me, is not that I stood up at a meeting in 1812. People make too much of that. I stood up in April. I had seen Silas Doak in the first week of February.

Two months. A woman fed my children through a winter out of her own stores and I sat on what I had seen for two months because I was frightened, and I was still ahead of everybody else in that building, and that is not a thing to be proud of. That is a thing to be quiet about.

I only tell it now because there is nobody left on that creek to be embarrassed by it, and because the settlement is a town now, with a bank in it, and there are people in that town who will tell you there were never any Delaware families in the sycamore bottom at all.

There were. Rachel Hill was the best neighbor I ever had in my life. She broke the ice on my spring in the dark for three months and would not be thanked for it, and when she finally asked me for something it was not for herself, and she was gone out of that country within nine years by the signature of men who never saw her.

And my children lived.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.