The Inn Keeper’s Widow

A Somewhat Whimsical Tale of Love and Loss,

Not Necessarily In That Order

Some stories are best told in prose

Some best told in rhyme.

But rhyme is such a fickle thing

And difficult at times.

So I will tell this tale in both.

The prose should be amusing.

But it’s the rhymes that make the point

If the prose prove too confusing.

Chapter 1

Unspoken Issues

She didn’t seem so if you met her on the street or in her pleasant inn, but the handsome woman, not yet forty, was a widow in mourning.  Her husband, the former inn keeper, only four years her senior, had died quite suddenly.  The inn was not large but sat on the main road that passed beside her small village between the city of Boston and the industrious coast of Maine.  A respectable inn this was.  The village and its strident mayor would accept nothing less.  The mayor, you should know, was the older brother of the departed inn keeper and sanctimoniously close to God in all things.  His younger brother, now cherished in death, had been his most perplexing problem in life.  The basis of that problem had two causes that wound like roots into the soil of the past and their fractious early lives as children together.

The first and, in the opinion of the mayor, only issue was that his younger brother was too happy with life.  Of course those were not the words the Godly mayor would have used.  He would have said that his younger brother lacked in seriousness, in humility, in subservience to God.  The child that would become the future inn keeper did not know that he was lacking in anything.  He did know that he spent an inordinate amount of time in church and that, when in that holy place, he was severely taxed to control his playful, curious and friendly nature.  Our future mayor was doubly perplexed at the clearly required discipline that would invariably fail to accompany his younger brother’s transgressions.  Whenever the child’s overtaxed self-control collapsed and the Devil lead him ever closer to the abyss, his older brother held on to the hope that the Devil’s punishment would vindicate the mayor in training’s ongoing effort to correct his little brother’s ways.  Our mayor to be seemed the only person that saw the danger to his younger brother’s immortal soul.  It was as clear as the light from above that tolerance of the child’s playful nature would lead to his degradation as he matured.  That those adults closest to the errant youth seemed to be the most anxious to turn from the obvious danger was the older brother’s greatest frustration.  

The second cause of our mayor’s angst was something he refused to even acknowledge.  It was that people generally liked his little brother and generally disliked him.  Not only the village children, who would gladly leave the budding mayor behind whenever some new adventure was undertaken, but the adults he tried so hard to please often shunned him.  Even to other Puritans, to whom sanctimonious displays were the focusing lens of daily life, the young mayor to be was simply too difficult to endure outside of church.  

If the idea of Puritan children undertaking adventures seems counter to what you learned in your second grade picture books, your high school Hester Prynne, and your college Crucible readings, let me assure you that they did.  For Puritan children were children first and Puritans second.  In the specific case of our young future inn keeper, being a good Puritan was somewhat farther down his list.

And it wasn’t just that people generally liked his little brother better, it was a person specific that raised the greatest ire.  The little girl next door, with her blond locks, her blue eyes, her open and friendly face, the little girl that had been his only childhood friend, outside of his brother, it was that person who seemed to care more for his younger sibling, even with his serious deficiencies.  Despite the future mayor’s many off putting habits, the little girl next door had always been kind and usually happy to see him.  But that person of his childhood dreams seemed to come more and more under the influence of his little brother’s devilish ways with each passing year.  

You may have noticed that I referred to our up and coming inn keeper as the other “only friend” of our aspiring mayor.  And as unlikely as this may sound, considering the ill will carried in the heart of his older brother, it was absolutely true.  For none of that ill will passed between them, or if it did, none of it lodged in the heart of that younger miscreant of the family.  As a matter of fairly irrefutable fact, it was mainly through the leadership and insistence of the child inn keeper that the child mayor was likely to be included in any activities at all.

This situation, instead of building a bond to his little brother, only exacerbated the growth of the green harpy of envy, a grievous sin for the older Puritan boy, one he never acknowledged but buried deeper and deeper within him.  Buried or not, the unacknowledged sin was still a sin and took on its own life deep in the soil of his soul.  This sin grew strong within him and fed the unspoken issues between the future mayor and his happy little brother during the whole of their lives together.

Island

Chapter 1

What was she doing, high over the western Atlantic, on her own, heading to a strange place for a questionable purpose at nearly six hundred miles per hour?  Most people would be happy to get off the crowded plane and get to the beach or the pool or wherever they were going.  Not Sarah.  The plane had a soft roar that wrapped her in the protected space of her assigned seat.  The altitude buffered her from the unknowns of the blue sphere passing below.  She wanted to stay in the air, safe in the roar of those engines, to leave her past farther and farther behind without having to ever set down in her future.  If only she could.  A year of planning was yielding only anxiety bordering on dread.  Somewhere ahead, in all that blue, was her destination, the Island.  She ran through it all again, as the world passed below.    

It had been Sherry’s idea at the beginning and Sarah had started to think the trip was the only thing that kept her going over the months leading up to takeoff.  Two weeks before departure her bag had been packed and repacked each day, in preparation and anticipation.  The ritual would continue until the night the two of them were to leave.  Her first trip of more than fifty miles since the divorce, an opportunity she wasn’t going to waste.  Nine years and the relief at escaping that marriage had never left her.  It wasn’t that her sporadic dating life had been any less traumatic.  They had been a series of widely spaced mini disasters, but they had been so much easier to get out of.  Each fiasco was followed by the pledge, “never again.”  And she meant it when she said it.  But her man choices never seemed to get any better.  The celibate life would work for a few months but she was in her mid-thirties.  Masturbation had its limits.  This trip would provide the kind of diversion she was growing desperate for.      

That she had now been divorced for as long as she had been married somehow surprised her.  It had never been a good relationship and it only got worse after the wedding.  Sid had been a man/child from the beginning, prone to tantrums when he didn’t get his way.  If you asked him, he never got his way, and that was part of the problem.  It didn’t seem to matter whether he had been screwed at work or by any one of his numerous “friends,” a group of equally half grown high school buddies.  Most of them had wives that had replaced their mothers to take care of them.  A few were still clinging desperately to Mom herself, with no interest in changing the situation.  The second part of the problem was that she was the primary witness to his angry displays.  He couldn’t act that way at work, not if he wanted to keep his job.  He wouldn’t put on his little shows in front of his friends.  They would only ridicule him for it.  It had become her responsibility to placate his outbursts, displays that had become more frequent as the years passed.

In the beginning his anger could be broken with a few soft words and the release that came with a few hours in the bedroom.  It had been almost gratifying to see how easily she could settle him down.  Never fearing him, she had been his vent, not the target of his frustration; she moved through the years feeling more stifled with each turn of the calendar.  He was good to be in bed with in those early years, taking pride in his ability to bring her along slowly, reaching her orgasm as often as not.  By the end of those nine years, the sex was no longer enough for either of them, becoming more of a burden than an objective.  Her patience had been exhausted.  After a tantrum he would ignore her completely or take her to bed, pound away over her for a few minutes, roll off, and drift into unencumbered sleep.  It could have gone on like that except for the inevitable cheating, circumstantial to be sure, late nights, the smell of someone else on his clothes (she had always been especially aware of smells), a package of condoms in his sock drawer, he was not a clever man.  His admission came on a less than sober Friday night.  She visited a lawyer on Monday morning.

Sherry had been by her side through all of it.  They had worked together for ten years and Sherry had been her mentor when she started.  The Company was a big employer in that part of New Jersey.  It might have held opportunities, but Sarah’s hopes had not been high .  The marriage had already slipped into disappointment and working for low wages in a mind numbing job did not fit the image she had once pictured for herself.  If Sherry hadn’t been there to ease her along, she might not have made it through the first year.  Sherry wasn’t a likely friend, loud and brassy with overdone hair; not a person Sarah would have been drawn to.  It didn’t matter.  Sherry seemed to be drawn to her and that was enough.  It turned out to be a good match.  Bravado was something Sarah would have a need for over the coming years and Sherry had enough for both of them.

To be fair, they had both done well in the insurance business.  Sarah had a thorough and diligent way of approaching work.  She had moved up in the organization to the point where she could actually support herself, if just barely.  Without the job she would not have been able to leave Sid.  The situation she found herself in was far from where she thought she would be just a few years from forty.  A life of adventure and travel had been the dream of her youth.  That was what she had seen for herself and that was what she was going have, sort of.  This trip would be that adventure, if only for a week - two days in transit - during the off season.  Her vision of adventure would have to adjust to the reality of her limited means.

It had been nearly a year since Sarah’s last fling at dating, another attempt that had not gone well.  It was a recurring theme with her and Sherry had seen it coming.  She could always tell when Sarah had reached the tipping point, when her needs started to override her caution.  Trying to channel Sarah’s interest toward someone appropriate had never worked.  Sherry had recently set her up with an actuarial statistician on the seventh floor.  Howard was nice looking in a white bread kind of way and pleasant, but clearly not Sarah’s type, at least according to Sarah.  His job title said it all.  Sherry had introduced them and brought him along to lunch several times in the beginning.  The conversation had always been pleasant and easy.  Sherry would find an excuse to leave them together and Sarah had to agree, he was a nice man.  Howard was her age, well-educated and employed, and handsome enough.  They had become part of a small group, put together by Sherry, meeting after work at the lounge just down the block.  That had been followed by two dates where Howard had been a perfect gentleman.  That was part of the problem.  Sarah wasn’t in the mood for a perfect gentleman.  She declined his next two invitations with the weakest of excuses.  Pissed would best describe Sherry’s reaction.  All her work and Sarah had not allowed for any possibility of a connection.  Her reasons were as weak as the excuses she had given poor Howard.  He’s divorced.  He has two kids.  He lives in the suburbs.  Sherry countered.  Sarah was divorced.  His kids were great.   She hated living in an apartment downtown.  Sherry had started to think poor Howard was being rejected out of Sarah’s fear that he would be the perfect man for her if she gave him a chance, or that he might reject her if she didn’t act first.

But Sarah was feeling the need for more than statistics.  She gravitated to a slick, bad boy executive that had started buying her drinks one Friday night and showed up at her desk the next Monday.  “Dating Disaster” could have been printed on his business card and Sherry tried to point out the signs.  It was a cliché that those signs were the primary source of attraction for her friend.  Sherry didn’t understand Sarah’s growing feeling that life was passing her by.  To Sherry it looked like panicky, irrational grasping that was counterproductive and possibly dangerous.

The common wisdom of the single girl was to avoid sleeping with your date on the first night.  This was not a rigid rule, it depended on several variables.  The primary variable, in this case, was the length of time between our heroine’s last sexual encounter and the one quickly approaching.  As the evening moved from dinner to a local jazz club, to his place for a nightcap, the evening’s trajectory became increasingly clear.  She had abandoned any pretext of going home still celibate when she agreed to that late drink.  He had removed much of her clothing and moved her to the bedroom before the ice in their glasses had started to melt.  That date set the pattern for the next month.  The following three weekends consisted of her being picked up, dinner, and sex in his bed before being returned home before midnight.  He never called for their fifth date.  She saw him in the building from time to time but they didn’t talk.  It was a big place.  There was no need.    

A year had passed as the trip approached and she wondered what she would do if he called after so much time.  It was a measure of her hormonal condition that she was even considering the question.  Part of the trip’s appeal was the idea of taking her sex life into her own control, a rejection of the idea that she had to sit waiting for his, or anyone’s call.  An unacceptable marriage or an unacceptable single life, they weren’t going to be her only choices.

Sherry had a friend who had made the trip each of the last three years.  The island was a favorite for women of a certain age apparently, a little out of the mainstream, inexpensive accommodations, black market shopping, beaches, warm and muggy this time of the year, and beautiful beach boys, the product of two hundred years of French/African genetic advancement.  The shopping was of no interest to Sarah.  The thrifty accommodations were certainly an enticement.  The warm, muggy weather and beaches were available within a hundred miles of her apartment.  It was the beach boys that had caught her attention.  Sherry translated the more salacious aspects of the island story into a narrative that would appeal to her friend and they were soon making their plans.

Sherry had proposed the trip as a lark, a onetime adventure with no specific intent except some excitement in a different place.  Had Sherry backed out, even a week earlier, would Sarah have been on the plane at all?  The answer was a clear “yes.”  It was more than a lark for Sarah.  She needed to prove to herself that she had options and that she controlled those options.  A statistician should not be the only choice she had.  

The change of pitch in the engines was unmistakable.  The descent was slow at first but accelerated with the pilot’s announcement that they were preparing for landing and that the tower had cleared them for a long final approach.  They would be on the ground in fifteen minutes.  The sky was clear with some scattered clouds.  The wind was out of the east at twelve miles per hour, and the temperature was a balmy eighty four.  He failed to mention that the humidity was also in the eighties, a significant omission that the passengers would soon discover for themselves.

Graduation

A Note

Graduation is generally seen as a singular transition, one that is overseen by a school or some other institution.  In this story the term is applied somewhat more broadly, and each transition is primarily self-administered.  It is a story of balance, of fierce independence and thoughtful caution, adventurous exploration and careful observation, the ability to master fear and to maintain restraint.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Dominic lived in a golden age.  The printing press had made the distribution of knowledge an ever widening phenomenon, no longer controlled by a small group of clerics and academics.  Like waves pushed through a pond by the dropping of a very large stone, the written word reached out in every direction.  To be sure, there were those whose interests were put at risk by this situation, and they would try to place barriers in the path of this expanding enlightenment.  Like vertical sticks stuck in the mud, the wave simply encircled them and continued to move outward undeterred.  A rising merchant class had taken their new knowledge to the market place, pulling themselves out of serfdom and up against the back sides of the aristocracy itself.  The distribution of knowledge turned anyone who could read into a philosopher, a scientist, a historian, an innovator.  The floodgates of the educational monopoly had been broken and the pace of society’s corresponding change had reached the dizzying speed of a six horse coach.  

This is not to say that the young heroine of our story lived a golden life.  No parentless child has a life to envy and our young lady would have been very happy to exchange all her yet unrealized advantages for a regular seat at her own family’s table.  Instead Dominic’s world consisted of a single bed in a large hall in a small cloister, now an orphanage school run by the Church.  She was the brightest of her group and brighter than most of the older girls as well.  Her quick wits did not always endear her to the nuns who were her teachers, and she had been to see the Old Priest on more than one occasion.  For reasons known only to the god of that old and cold place, and possibly to the girl herself, she seemed carefree, uninhibited and undaunted by her precarious position in the world.  She had her ways, as you will see, of always being two mental steps ahead of those around her.  In the case of the slow witted nuns, this was not a difficult situation to maintain, but it was this happy independence that so dismayed and even angered her keepers.

It had once been the prosperous place, the cloister of an obscure sect, now fallen from favor in the eyes of the Church.  It was larger than its current use required and considering the size of the small town that was a short walk down the gradual hill to the south.  Stone ramparts backed by wings of rooms, many no longer used, surrounded a courtyard of faded gardens.  The look of military defense was not an accident.  When it was built on its elevated site, the world was a dangerous place.  The consolidation of nations was a work still in progress.  Anyone with something worth taking was subject to having it taken.  Alliances and thick walls of stone were the accepted, although not always successful, means of protection.  In our young heroine’s time the high stone walls served only to protect the virtue of the young women inside and that function was an illusion, of course, as we shall see.  

But I have strayed from the tour and should return.  The gates to the cloister faced south towards the town.  The rooms attached to the gate wall were home to the remaining nuns and many now stood empty.  At the west end of that wing were the kitchen and adjacent storerooms.  The east wall of the cloister was backed by a large chapel, still in use each day in the preservation of the souls of orphans and nuns alike.  The west wall protected the large day rooms of the convent.  The two ground floor spaces were now the sewing room and the dining hall, which butted against the kitchen on its south end.  The dining room had a secondary function as the classroom for the formal educational activities of the place.  Upstairs from these large day rooms were the sleeping rooms of the orphans.  They matched the size and shape of the ones below, with the younger girls above the dining/classroom on the south end and the older girls over the sewing room to the north.  

The north wing consisted of a long corridor with rooms to each side that once housed thirty or more nuns in small cells.  They now stood empty or were used to store items long forgotten and now in a state of slow deterioration, like the cloister itself.  At the east end of that corridor were the rooms of the Old Priest.  His office, on the ground floor, abutted the wall that backed the chapel altar and had a small door giving him access to the chapel.  The room was finished in old oak, darkened by time and the soot of ten thousand candles.  It was lushly furnished by comparison with its neighbors.  The chapel had an austere quality that lent little comfort to the young occupants of this Holy fortress.  His private room was directly above the office with access down a matching corridor on the second floor or a small stairway from the office below at the corner of his private room above.  The high ceiling of the office allowed for the morning sun to come through the equally high windows all along the east side.  Bookshelves lined the wall under the windows, holding old and dusty volumes that had not been opened in the lifetime of any of the young charges now living there.  A heavy door at the right end of these bookshelves led through the thick exterior wall to the livestock yard and buildings that supported the cloister’s once thriving agricultural interests.  A few sheep, pigs, and chickens remained, but the heavy door had not been opened by the Old Priest in many years.    

Although the institution was generally referred to as a school, its primary activity was more in line with that of a work house.  The old nuns had learned several years earlier that they could not support themselves through their own efforts and the Mother Church was not inclined to subsidize them indefinitely.  It was this realization that sent the nuns into their chapel in search of heavenly guidance.  The path to a solution eventually revealed itself with the help of prayer, as well as a firm desire to avoid any solution that might be construed as work.  The idea of taking in societies cast off children came as a happy opportunity to serve God, put food on the table, and shift the labor of the place to their proposed charges.  The first two objectives are easy to understand, but the third may require a little more explanation.   Even with a name that indicated an orphan’s school, educational activities tended to occupy no more than an hour each day.  That is if you don’t count the hours of cleaning, laundering and sewing, activity which occupied much of the orphans day.  The nuns, who had raised some minor funds by the work of their own needles, had a holy premonition that the small, quick hands of the young girls could produce enough product to provide a good income for them and some surplus to send on to the Mother Church, thereby helping to secure their eternal salvation.  It was this calculation that had come to them through their efforts in the chapel and the outcome had allowed the nuns to grow even fatter as a result.

To be fair, as far as the schooling that took place, even one hour of reading and arithmetic was more than Dominic would have found at most family hearths during that golden time, and almost no girl of her status would have had even this loosely defined school available.  

When I say reading, I should explain that this did not include the complementary skill of writing.  Even the proficiency of each student’s reading skill was generally left to the individual girl.  I can tell you that the level was consistently very low.  It may have had something to do with the lack of any kind of actual reading material.  The Bible served as their only source material and, even then, only short selected text, not the book as a whole.  The holy book was not generally considered appropriate reading for the young girls of the school.  The interpretation of the Bible was the sole province of the Old Priest.  Only a few of the girls read well enough to make it through any significant amount of the text in any case and none of them held an inclination to try.  Well, almost none.  Dominic’s mind seemed to work in a way different from the others, different even from the adults around her, probably different from almost anyone in the small town that was her home.  She had been very young when letters began to organize themselves into logical patterns and groups.  She would grasp the simple rules of the letters immediately, with the more complicated ones coming to her after short consideration.  She would test her understanding on anything that was available, and the sacred book held no intimidation for her.  She considered it only her inexhaustible source of words.  By the time she was twelve she was forced to reevaluate her definition of inexhaustible, as she had committed much of the text to memory.  Her writing skills lagged behind.  The limitations in her access to writing materials made it difficult to practice.  When she did write, her words had the strange mechanical style of the text she had memorized.  Once she started accompanying the older girls on their errand trips to town, she found it easier to secure her own writing implements and her skills increased quickly.  But that part of the story will come along in its own time.

If words were a kind of plaything for the girl, numbers, were magical and not something to take lightly.  Arithmetic may imply an inflated level of educational experience.  The girls of the school were more accurately involved in learning their numbers.  Simple single digit addition and subtraction were more complicated than half of them could master.  Even the old nuns teaching them would have had a difficult time with multiplication or division.  The magic for Dominic was that she didn’t appear to need a teacher at all.  If the logic of letters and their rules made understanding their use plain, that condition increased by an order of magnitude when it came to numbers.  She could add and subtract long series of numbers in her head by the time she was eight.  She extrapolated her own simple system of multiplication and division by her tenth year.  It was not only that she knew how to manipulate numbers on her slate or in her mind, she knew how to use them to solve problems in the real world, the simple ones, dealing with money and product counts, as well as more conceptual problems like laying out patterns and the best use of cloth in the sewing room.  

By the time she was eleven years old she had dismissed the often repeated lament of the nuns that the Church, through their Holy order, was taking care of the poor girls at great sacrifice, as a service to God.  The orphans should pray every night for the Lord’s protection of their religious community, the Old Priest that oversaw their protection, and the Mother Church; that would save all their souls if they were good.  A simple estimate of the profit potential of the school’s little enterprise was enough to convince Dominic that the nuns’ great sacrifice was surely not a financial one.  

Within a year of this estimate she started to attend the small groups of older girls as they were sent down into the town for various materials and supplies.  The old nuns had grown too fat on their sacrifices to climb back up the hill and hardly ever accompanied them.  Some of the shopkeepers had settled into the practice of favoring their financial gain over their spiritual peril when it came to their dealings with the slow witted girls.  To their credit, the slightly quicker nuns had started to notice.  That’s when they began to send twelve year old Dominic to stand behind her older associates as the requested items were assembled and the price totaled.  Before the transaction was completed, she would proceed to the front of the small group and point out each error in the summing of the bill, each mistake invariably in the favor of the unscrupulous merchant.  Any attempt by the shopkeeper to convince the little girl that she had been the one to error was quickly abandoned in the face of the little girl’s expertise, especially if another customer was watching as the child ran through the tally.

This exposure, besides saving the school a significant amount of money, gave young Dominic the evidence she had been missing during her estimate of the school’s finances.  Now she could plug the actual cost of their supplies into her little equation and confirm with even more confidence that she and the other girls were not a burden but the support of their little community of castoffs.  The information, now corroborated, had no effect on her willingness to do what she could in maintaining that community.  It did throw another net of doubt over the rest of the dogma, ritual, liturgy and practice of the organization.  None of it held the clear logic she so quickly recognized in her studies.  Her little investigation confirmed that the church and its rules were more unfathomable and at least as self-serving as she had previously suspected.                  

Suburbs

Chapter 1

They were small worlds, the Southern California suburbs of the late fifties and sixties, at least for the children living in them.  Isolated from the other worlds around them, they lived much of their lives separated by four lane boulevards that crisscrossed the metropolis in both directions every mile or two.  Each square thus created had all the services, markets, strip malls, and gas stations that were required to support suburban life, located on those boulevards around its perimeter.  In the middle of the square was the school that served the neighborhood and its mass of post war children.  There was no need to leave your world for another and the children of those places seldom did, at least on their own.  The only logical way to venture forth was aboard a device that had become so ubiquitous during the previous two decades as to be taken completely for granted by the youngsters under discussion here.  You can think of the automobile as a kind of spaceship for getting from one of these worlds to another.  Cars were the inter-planetary vehicles of the suburbs.  Just look at a 1959 Chevy if you think I’m stretching this analogy.  The symbiosis between the suburbs and the automobiles that made them possible would become a chicken and egg situation that would fuel more than a few doctoral dissertations when those children reached their majority.  You might say it’s what fueled this little examination into one very specific neighborhood and the children that grew up there.  I cannot say with certainty that the events to be discussed here might not have played out in some similar way on the Midwestern plains of small town Iowa, but I have a feeling that it would have been much more unlikely.

The children of these worlds were amazingly free to move around within them.  Offering the vaguest of explanations to their parents, they could leave their beige stucco house on a Saturday morning and not return until dinner time without a query as to their activities during the entirety of that day.  If a parent did ask, the only answer necessary might be something like “Bob’s house.”  It was an adequate explanation if you were at least ten years old.   The children, for their part, were unlikely to extend their range beyond the busy boulevard boundaries of their home world for several reasons.  The most important restriction was distance.  A square mile, or so, is a significant expanse for the average elementary school child to roam and most did not feel the need to push very far outside that territory.  The second limitation was that these residential worlds were frequently not contiguous with one another.  They could be bordered by an area of light industrial or commercial development or large expanses of open space that had not yet come under the blade of the developer’s bulldozers.  These open fields, with their tumbled down shacks, old oil derricks and other intriguing pre-suburban ruins, could sometimes prove as much enticement as barrier, especially for the older and more adventuresome, but they still provided a buffer between the next suburban planet and the child’s own.  The last reason for their isolation is the same for all of us.  The worlds outside were unknown and foreign places with all the risks, real and perceived, that keep most of us at home.  

I don’t mean to give the impression that the children of the suburbs were prisoners of their small environment.  They were likely to board the family spaceship on almost any day and leave their world for another nearby or one half a galaxy away.  Such were the wonders of this extraordinary new place.  The difference was that vehicular travel was a completely passive activity for children.  They likely had no idea where they were going.  I don’t mean their destination.  That they may have understood, but they had no measure of distance, direction, or path of travel.  Within their neighborhood they understood all these things completely and, with few exceptions, they controlled their movements entirely.

The great liberator for the children of these worlds was a device as important to them as the automobile was to their parents.  Even their relatively small world would have been a burden to navigate without it, but with a bicycle no corner of their boulevard encircled home planet was out of reach.  The most adventurous among them would use these devices to extend their exploration to places that would have made their unwitting parents cringe.

To be clear, most of the activities I have described here were more likely to apply to the daily lives of the male children in question.  The neighborhood girls seemed to live under a different set of rules that were unfathomable to the male members of this half grown society.   The young protagonist of our story had wondered, on many occasions over the years of his youth, about the secret activities undertaken by his associates of the opposite sex.  It was his observation that the girls he had known since moving into the neighborhood at the age of ten, the girls that joined the group of children each morning for the walk to school, the girls that talked and played and seemed more or less normal during all of that school day, and walked back to their houses with the group again in the afternoon, would, almost without fail, disappear into those houses, not to be seen again until they emerged the next morning to join the ranks of the living once more on their daily excursion to the schoolyard.  He could not imagine what they could be doing inside those houses for all those hours, especially during the long days at the beginning and end of the school year that bracketed the even longer sunlit summer evenings.

Those long summer days presented a situation that was completely beyond his grasp when it came to the young ladies of his suburban world.  That carefree expanse of time followed the same format as the school year when it came to the activities of his female friends.  Whereas the understood objective of all of the neighborhood boys was to be outside for as many hours of the long summer days as possible, the corresponding young ladies could almost never be enticed to show up for such important events as street games of football or baseball, fort building in the adjacent field, or bike races to the playground and back.  It made no sense to the very young man.  

Pacific Bride

Part 1

Chapter 1

He was to be on one of the first ships that would eventually carry thousands of his countrymen and women to the island continent.   New South Wales was a place so far away, so remote, and so unoccupied as to be deemed nearly worthless, except as a possible warehouse for the thieves, frauds, and scoundrels that polite society was eager to be rid of.  It was a continent now viewed as penal colony, a new concept, where minimal resources would be required to maintain the felons and other castoffs of a society whose jails were full and whose poorhouses were overflowing.  Keeping so many locked away was becoming an unacceptable drain on society, approaching the drain of having them free on the streets.   The Nation would try another system.  It would give those miscreants a kind of freedom.  They would be free to survive or die far from the shores and the collective conscience of England.  And many would die far from home, at sea and on a barren shore at the far edge of the world.  But the majority would not die; they would survive and, to the surprise of their jailers, even thrive in that inhospitable and isolated place.  

He was a big man and had used his size when necessary, but most of his living was made with his mind.  He would much rather cheat a person than simply take what he wanted by force.  There was no challenge in violence.  It required no plan, no finesse, and the risk of hanging escalated quickly once physical harm was inflicted.  His unwillingness to use violence was the main reason he wasn’t going to the gallows now.  The number of hangings, and the wide ranging justifications for them, had been one of the reasons for the development of the “transporting” plan.  Liberal busybodies throughout the country had been making noise for years.  It was getting so you couldn’t hang anyone anymore.  

The other prisoners scheduled for transport were, like him, true criminals, but he had no fear of them.  His wits and his size had not been enough to keep him from the retribution of society, but he was quite sure they were enough to warrant his safety, and possibly his success, from what he knew of society’s new plan for his future.  

The only obstacle that clouded his prospects, from his point of view, was the voyage itself.  The terrible conditions, the long months, the confinement aboard the ship, he could make the best of those hardships.  It was being on the sea that he feared, its bottomless depth, its endless reach, its rolling and crashing surface.  There was no reason for his fear.  He had only been on the sea once.  It was as a child and it had been a pleasant day, crossing the Irish Sea to the new land of England.  Like someone afraid of heights, he refused to venture near the railing of the little ship that ferried his family to their new place in a very precarious world.  That fear now kept him ever watchful for an opportunity to slip away.  His fear of the gallows was barely enough to overcome his fear of being out on that open sea.

And it was as he had thought it would be.  The food, bad from the start, was nearly inedible by the time they made their first resupply.  It was a pattern that repeated itself two more times before their final destination was reached.  Several of the prisoners had not survived the passage.  Even two of the crew had succumbed to the rigors of the trip.  His physical size and mental abilities served him as he had expected, leading to some productive labor in the service of the ship.  Emptying the latrine buckets, cleaning the below deck spaces, and even working on the main deck from time to time, had earned him more food and gave him the opportunity to keep himself cleaner, to get fresh air and sunshine, and to generally stay in better physical condition than the other prisoners.  But it was the food that was the key.  What he didn’t eat himself, he smuggled to those that had something of value to trade.  If any newly acquired item was of little use to him, he would trade it again until he got something he wanted.  Of all the materials that went through his hands on that voyage, he soon learned that money held the least benefit.  To accrue value, an object had to help you stay alive.  The more direct this cause and effect, the more valuable the object.  

First food and then tools, that was the order of value for trade goods.  Tools didn’t mean hammers and saws.  His most highly prized tool was a small set of scissors.  They could be easily concealed on his person or somewhere on the ship.  He used them to keep his hair and beard as short as possible.  This, along with frequent salt water baths whenever he was allowed on deck, kept the tenacious fleas and other energy-sucking skin parasites to a minimum.  He was soon trading haircuts for other goods of value to him.  By the time the low hills of his new home rose above the horizon, he had accumulated nearly everything of value that he wanted from the other prisoners and several items from the sailors as well.

The only thing that changed when he was put ashore was the scale of his operation.  With no need for secrecy or concealment, his activities took on the look and shape of a legitimate business.  The location of his first enterprise was in his government issued tent (its three other occupants were quickly induced to move on), set up just above the high water mark on the wind swept beach at his point of deposit on that inhospitable shore.  The proximity to the sea, his fear of which had only been exacerbated by his recent experience, and the lack of security provided by the canvas fabric, convinced him to trade for his second place of business.  The roughhewn wooden planked shack stood two hundred yards up the sandy street which ran perpendicular to the beach, stopping at the low scrubby bushes some half mile inland.

There was an official English presence in a small fortified encampment which sat on a hill to the north, but the management of the place was lax in the extreme.  It was almost as if the authorities were planning and hoping that the criminal nature of the occupants would assure a course of self-destruction, allowing those in charge to go home as soon as possible.  Those officials were to have their wishes stifled on two fronts.  The first was that more transport ships continued to arrive with an ever-expanding segment of unwanted humanity, eventually including women and even children.  The second was that the arrivals consistently failed to bring about their own destruction.

Even the early influx, those true criminals like our reluctant main character, seemed to cobble together a kind of natural order based on sometimes unidentifiable principles.  Force was certainly at play, but, to the surprise of even the criminal elements themselves, it did not seem to take a prominent place in the organization of the quickly growing town.  Like our recently arrived friend, the population saw cheating, lying and trickery as honorable ways to make a living.  Violence was a desperate measure of last resort.  Their new home wasn’t that much different from the society they had been forced to leave behind.  The newly arrived trader was very good at perpetrating these methods on others and equally good at protecting himself from becoming the victim of them. In two years he had moved two more times and always into a better situation.

England viewed its program as successful beyond its expectations and had expanded the transportation policy to anyone deemed even marginally undesirable.  The list of those deemed appropriate for transport extended to anyone that could be construed as a drain on the resource of those with resources.  The cost of keeping the poorhouses and debtors prisons open could much more reasonably go to further enriching those who were farthest from them.  The English presence on the other side of the world, even if it was a continental penal colony, was still a presence, and the political reality of that presence was a secondary advantage for the already successful policy.

Chapter 2

The ever increasing number of arrivals represented opportunities for those already there.  Those newly put ashore thought they brought almost nothing of value with them.  The waiting cheats and scoundrels knew better.  The government was allowing them to bring whatever the English legal system had seen fit to leave in their possession and it was the practice of the waiting parasites to separate them from those possessions as quickly as possible.  The truly destitute, those with nothing but the strength of their bodies, would be convinced or coerced into giving up even that.

Our not so newly arrived trader was chief among the gathered ruffians and scoundrels whenever a new ship arrived.  His wits and his size conspired to give him a significant advantage, which he always took.  It had been the key to his noteworthy success.  

The little hive of a town was abuzz with the arrival of a ship on that cool and cloudy morning.  Caught in the middle of an important negotiation, he found himself arriving uncharacteristically late at the waterfront where the offloading was well underway.  The prisoners had been processed on board and were nearly all ashore when he approached the back of the crowd.  Two flimsy looking piers had been newly built to accommodate the ever increasing arrivals from Mother England.  He began to push his way to the front of the rogues gathered there and carried a significant purse, safe inside his stout canvas pants, but only a few shillings and pence in his pocket.  He didn’t want the other parties present to get the idea he had plenty of cash.  The trader was also not interested in the human cargo, beyond whatever trading goods they might possess.  With no farm or animals to work and nothing he wanted to build, he needed no labor.  It was not in his nature to enslave or indenture a man or woman.  Stealing their property, of course, was only good business.  The ships were starting to carry legitimate cargo as the prisoner society continued to grow; hardware and tools, clothing and cloth, household items and any number of other things that the trader was focused on.  He would wait to get what he could at his price.  The others would spend themselves down quickly, no one had much money.  Waiting until the currency stopped moving and the ship’s captain became more motivated, not wanting to haul the same merchandise the rest of the way around the world and back to England, was a strategy he had settled on and it had served him well.  

All of these thoughts slipped from his mind as the last few prisoners came down the gangway.  At the very end of that line was a tallish young woman, thin and dazed looking, as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep to find herself in this strange and empty place.  He had seen that look often.  It was a kind of illness in the mind.  Their arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, week after week at sea, and the poorest of food and shelter through it all, had induced a trance-like effect. The person so effected would shelter deep within themselves.  It was a condition he would normally take advantage of, but something about this occasion created the opposite desire within him.  Maybe it was because he could easily see that she had nothing at all to steal.  Anything she might have managed to bring along had long since been taken from her.  It might have been the knowledge that a young woman, incapable of caring for herself, would soon find out that her troubles were only going to take on a new dimension, now that the forced discipline of the ship was lifted.  You may have your own ideas about why the trader did what he did, but in my opinion her helplessness became the trigger that summoned the long dormant inclination of protection.  In any case he moved quickly through the vultures already picking through that human cargo, arriving at the gangway as the glazed eyed girl stepped bare footed onto the rough boards of the pier.  Taking her hand as if he knew her, he led her just as quickly back through the accumulated scoundrels.  No one would have been successful at challenging the big man, but the quickness and assurance of his action kept them all from even trying.  As the trader led her away, they realized he would not be a factor in the competition that was still playing out for the bulk of the ship’s spoils.  For that reason alone, they were glad to see him go.

He had no thought of the opportunities he was missing as he led the young stranger to his shop and into the apartment at the back.  Feeding her a simple meal, he bathed her without a thought of bashfulness, and put her in his bed between the first clean sheets she would ever remember sleeping in, had her mind been capable of memory.  He talked quietly to her almost continuously since they exited the crowd of men at the dock, but there had been no questions or introductions or anything even vaguely resembling a social interchange.  He only offered soft reassurance of where she was and what was happening during each phase of the transition from her shipboard existence to her new land-based life.  She never responded and her eyes never seemed to fully focus, even after she had been in bed for some time.  They stared past the objects in the room, through the wall and out to some distant place that only she could see.

The trader sat in a chair, pretending to read a book, where she could see him at the edge of her view, but was not forced to look at him.  When her eyes finally closed, he went into his shop and found an appropriate dress and other garments that were close to her size, laying them out on a chair near the bed.  He would find out who she was from the Lieutenant that had been in charge, but not until after she woke.  That, the event of her waking, turned out to be nearly twenty hours later.  

She was hungry.  The glaze was gone from her eyes but any discussion was limited to short questions and simple responses.  He got her name, which would help with the Lieutenant.  Between her answers and the official record, the story began to coalesce. As the days passed, she filled in more details.  She had grown up as poor as all of them, but her parents, with the help of her older brother’s and her own meager wages, had managed to keep a roof above and table below.  They usually had enough food to sustain them and their existence was no more precarious than most people at their wrung of the social ladder.  They might have survived for years in that kind of unstable equilibrium except for that night when her brother did not come home.  The reason was never to be known, but there were several options.  He could have left on his own to try to build a better life.  He could have been beaten or even killed for the few pence he earned each day.  He might have been “recruited” into His Majesty’s Navy by a roving press gang.  In any case, it was a setback that pushed the family over the edge.  Her only crime, when they were arrested, had been that her parents could no longer feed her, or even themselves.  They had spent just over a year in the poorhouse, not an auspicious place for a seventeenth birthday, when the transport order came.  The food had been poor and the work unending, but it was a hell they knew.  The hell they were now being sent to was unknown and therefore infinitely worse.  The notification that they were being transported as a family was the only thing that mitigated their dread.  That one mitigation quickly evaporated as they were loaded into separate wagons for the trip to the ship.  It should have concerned them more than it did, but they had become used to doing as they were told.  The young girl’s anxiety turned to panic when she found herself parentless as the hatch of the ship’s hold slid into place above her head.  A section of the ship, dark and damp, had been turned into a kind of women’s dormitory.  She was nearly the youngest there, but none of them were as old as her mother.  The oldest may have been thirty.  

The male prisoners were led to a similar hold toward the bow.  They appeared to be all ages from the little she saw before being closed into her new prison.  A more experienced and vocal member of her new group quickly offered an explanation about this strange set of events.  And if her proclamations could be believed, they were all being sent as “brides” for the growing number of men in the colony.  Married women wouldn’t do and older women did not suit the purpose.  The woman making this assessment was amazingly accurate in her estimate of the situation and she seemed to revel in the idea.  If the story held any truth, it would be only the first of an ever increasing list of setbacks for the younger girl in the months of floating perdition that lay ahead of her.