2024 Writing Contest Winner

No Turning Back

by Sharon MacInnes

July 1902, Little Sioux, IA

“Git up, woman,” Clayton hissed. Margaret, immediately on the alert, hoisted herself up on the sagging mattress, her swollen belly not fully retracted from her most recent pregnancy outlined tautly under her nightdress. Silently, she stared at her wild-eyed husband. “Wagon’s at t’side of the stable. Load up, y’hear?”

Margaret (Cooper) Pattison circa 1885

She slid her unwashed dress quickly over her shift, her eyes never leaving Clayton’s glaring face in the freshly lit lantern he was holding over her. She knew better than to ask questions. Her heart beating a brisk tattoo she was sure he could hear, she hastily woke up 14-year-old Ruth and 12-year-old Robert, holding her finger to her lips as they opened their eyes. Now all four of them gathered the few items stowed around the room, stepping as quietly as they could around the 5 remaining children sleeping on the floor of the shanty on the edge of Little Sioux, Iowa. Haphazardly but with grave purpose, they loaded the five rude chairs and rickety table, kitchen utensils, single rope bed, bag of flour and other food, as well as their scanty supply of clothing and bedding, into a freight wagon standing at the side of their shack—one that Margaret had never seen before and was sure her husband couldn’t have purchased. Clayton’s nervous team was hitched to it. Finally, the other children were awakened and, frightened into silence, they sleepily climbed into the wagon and settled into corners—all but 3-year-old Florenceⁱ who slept like a log and was unceremoniously deposited on a stained, nearly full bag of oats.

One of the horses tossed his head. The harness chains clanked ominously in the still night and Margaret caught her breath. She could hear the blood rushing through her head. She didn’t know why they were leaving in silence and the dead of night and she never would, but she knew something very bad had happened. She also knew with a certainty that she would never again see the only home she had ever known. Not that it mattered. Nothing was there for her any more. She didn’t care to visit the graves of the children she had lost, although losing Bernard at the cusp of making it to manhood at the age of 15 caused her throat to ache. She didn’t have a fine house to leave, or any house for that matter, only a pitiful leaking hut for shelter which often didn’t even live up to that description.

She waited for the inevitable numbness to set in, now that the immediate danger seemed to have passed. As she climbed into the front seat of the sagging wagon, one of the nervous horses stepped forward. She stumbled and lost her balance, stubbing her bare left toe viciously against the buckboard. She silently righted herself, sinking onto the splintered seat but leaving the reins for Clayton, and pulled her foot under her skirt in pain. She was still healing from her last stillbirth, the last of ten pregnancies to date. Her back ached ferociously, and she dug her fingers into the small of her back, hoping for some small relief.ⁱⁱ

As Clayton pulled the springless wagon away from the shack, the only emotion she could conjure up for the town was a feeling of good riddance.

Her mind seemed to move so slowly, just like her body seemed to do these days. She realized vaguely that they were heading south since the Missouri River was on their right, and for a day she hoped he reckoned to board the Chicago and North Western Railway train at the train hub in the hamlet of Missouri Valley. But after the silent 25-mile trip, they camped so she could make sHe occasionally spat and stuffed a pinch of snuff next to his cheek as he snapped the reins, but he didn’t stop and he didn’t talk. Ruth, who had been taking turns with Robert walking alongside the impossibly crowded wagon, jumped in and rearranged the bedding in the back to make the children more comfortable. She kept them quiet by regaling them with stories of Indians and outlaws who would attack and scalp them if they made a fuss. They spent a second full day plodding along the dusty road, enduring back-breaking jolting in the August heat. Again, they camped in their clothes on the prairie.

Missouri Valley, Iowa, circa 1899

Although Margaret knew that Clayton’s father, one of his brothers, and two married sisters lived in Jasper County, Missouri, near Joplin, she never dreamed he was headed for them. Why would he? In the solitary, long-ago-received letter he had ever received from his family, as far as she knew about, his brother warned Clayton not to come home and that his father never wanted to see him again. Patriarch Thomas Levens Marsh Pattison’s esteemed reputation had been sullied near 30 years ago when the boy was a short-fused 14-year-old and threw a knife at a storekeeper and then lit out for parts unknown. She believed it—he was short-fused now and was surely short-fused then. Margaret knew Clayton had bragged back in Little Sioux that before settling there in 1880, he had been in trouble with the law so he skedaddled and got a job breaking horses for the army until a horse fell on his leg and broke it a few years later. Clayton promptly pulled a pistol from his belt and shot the horse dead.

Whatever welcome Clayton was hoping for in Jasper County was an utter disappointment. Clayton’s father was stern and uncommunicative, and the rest of the family took his lead. Clayton had never maintained a relationship that was free of tension, even with his twin sister Clara. Probably hoping to get rid of him, they told him Clara was now in Goldfield, Colorado, hoping to strike it rich, although they hadn’t heard from her in a long time.

August 1902

In the nearly 20 years they had been married, Margaret had never seen her husband so animated and impatient. Leaving Jasper County in a huff, Clayton drove the horses hard, covering nearly 25 miles a day when the horses were able and the weather cooperated. Margaret and the children often followed on foot since sliding around in the overloaded old freight wagon often drove splinters into their flesh or tore their ragged clothes, but they took turns catching up and leaping over the tailgate into the wagon bed for respite. Even when hailed by covered wagons or travelers on horseback, the Pattison children knew to keep to themselves. Margaret rode wordlessly, accepting that Clayton would tell them their destination when he decided. She quietly gave Ruth thanks over and over again for her role in keeping the children distracted by relating stories she had read in dime novels, some of them even true. They mostly followed established trails across the High Plains, leaving Missouri and traversing the breadth of Kansas. When they reached Dodge City, the children could not hide their disappointment—Dodge City was just another dusty cow town of no interest, not the exciting lawless settlement of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, gunfights and Indians that Ruth had described.

After five weeks of aching legs and choking on dust, they reached Colorado and, finally, the busy city of Pueblo. Hoping against hope that Pueblo, a real town of over 2,000 people, was their final destination, Margaret savored two full days of camping while Clayton went out scouting, leaving the horses to graze. Their supplies were almost gone—Margaret was rationing daily meals as well as she could. But Clayton returned in high spirits and pushed them to set off again. Margaret was crestfallen. She mustered all of her waning energy to climb aboard. She had thrown up that morning, and she knew all the signs: miserably, she was certain that was with child yet again.

Two days later, Margaret dejectedly watched as they passed through Cañon City. Then they turned north on a rocky road and then west through the Rocky Mountains to Goldfield, about 4 miles from Cripple Creek, with the horses blowing and lathering for three days. Clayton immediately made for the saloon—he was parched, and he had in mind to track down his sister Clara and her miner husband. He returned later that evening, drunk and seething. He had seen Clara but she was not married to a wealthy miner who could help them out. Her husband, foreman at the Blue Bird Mine, had been killed 5 years earlier. Dennis was 200 feet below the surface and coming up in the bucket with another miner when a timber fell from the wall of the shaft and smashed into his skull. The other miner in the bucket kept him from falling down the hole but nothing could be done and he died two days later. Feeling sorry for the destitute widow, the Cripple Creek School Board appointed her janitor for still-uncompleted Goldfield school a month later.ⁱⁱⁱ Clayton’s dreams of striking it rich by joining his brother-in-law, or being supported by his twin sister Clara, vanished. He also realized how arduous and dangerous life was for gold miners, and Clayton was not fond of hard work. He was a teamster and he knew horses, but he only hired out as the driver. If some uppity merchant insisted he load the goods onto his wagon, the vitriol that spewed from his mouth shut them up but good.

Cold stone furious that Goldfield wouldn’t be his savior, Clayton decided they would leave the next day. Whipping the tired horses unmercifully, Clayton calculated that one or two more days’ travel would find them in Denver. After doggedly making their way through the mountain roads, however, one of the horses stumbled onto its knees and Clayton finally turned the exhausted drays into the neatly swept yard of a farm just outside Brighton, Colorado, for water and rest.

It was the worst mistake they could have made.

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