Horace Wainwright

My name? Horace Wainwright,
born in New York State,
wedded Louisa Johnson from Duke Co in ‘ought nine.
In eight years she birthed six times
but only Elijah and Simon were strong enough.
One child died of dysentery, another of the pox.
The others didn’t live past birth.

I carried my family to the west in 18 and 22
In a wagon filled with all our worldly goods.
We held as far as Wisconsin territory,
where the oxen took a sickness and passed within three days.
Two families nearby worked their spreads for farming
and seemed welcoming enough to us.
Since a crick ran near and the earth was black,
I took a slice of the prairie for my own.

I’d lusted for this land, these open miles,
where land was bountiful and for the taking
and an even trade for my sweat and labor.
If I’d thought it through, perhaps I’d not a treated the land
As poorly as I did, leaching the fertile soil so quickly.
But there were no such thinking in my day,
There was always land; there was land without end.

When we settled in the summer of 1823,
the prairie grass lay thick upon our sod,
And it was not without great strength of mind and body
that the youngsters and I dug the deep roots from the soil,
and if we’d not had a neighbor’s team and plow for hire,
we’d a had to move on further westward.
We wouldn’t a been the first to cross this land on foot.

I felled trees ‘long side the running crick
and built a crude home of wood and sod.
Louisa planted her garden on the side
and Simon and Elijah hauled the wood and water.
They gathered wilderness berries and caught us fish.
We traded chickens with a neighbor for a coin of gold
And the dog retrieved the hare and geese I shot.
So all told, we had enough to eat and put aside.

I set five acres rowed in corn,
five acres set in wheat and two in grass,
Though our corn, it grew in weeds and knee-deep grasses
and did not seed well. We used what we could.
Cutworms ate our flax, and when the wheat was fit for harvest,
rains came and threshed it to the ground before I could.

The land was a cruel master and my missus and I did suffer,
But I’d no time to lift her burdens.
The girl child she carried, died at half a year
And without Simon and Elijah,
she claimed she would have gone insane with grief.
As for her worrying, we had no elixir for such a cure.

I’d a cared better for them if I’d known how,
but I had my own strains.

When cholera came and claimed the three I loved,
I could not stay where once there had been laughter:
Where Louisa and I’d embraced each night in sleep,
Where my boys had chased crows from the fields,
And studied sums on chalkboard by the fire’s light,
Where the memories had grown deep even if the crops had not.

A man alone, I had my fair share of regrets,
on what I’d chosen to do and what I’d not,
though my life was not without its blessings and its joys.
But I had no purpose left to settle the Wisconsin homestead,
And I sold it to a family fatigued of travel
And picked myself on up and headed west.

Long later I died of snakebite from a gold flecked copperhead,
A handsome snake I’d not given enough respect.
Kind strangers laid me to my rest,
‘though I’ve yet to lie in peace.
When you have listened to my words,
I will have said enough to sleep.

I’ve spoken to you from near two hundred years ago.
I’ve spoken my piece.

barbara © 2007