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Penelope Grimes was born and raised in New York State, and ever since she could remember, she had been unhappy. Her father was a big, imposing man with thoughts only of power. Anyone that stood in his way got hurt, and Penelope had tried to stay out of his way. He did not mean to harm her, but he didn't care either.
Her mother was a weak willed and very quiet woman who was also afraid much of the time and shared that information with Penelope. On the evenings that parties were thrown by Henry Grimes, the two females would withdraw early and cower upstairs, while the rum flowed and ribald
stories were told below. Her father tended to get ugly after a night of drinking, and many is the night she lay with the covers pulled over her head scarcely daring to breathe.
Her mother's people were old, and they told of their childhood days when the Hudson Valley would ring with the cries of Mohawks and Eries, and how the redcoats came through trying to finish what the Indians had started. The stories were thrilling, but Penelope could picture all too well the images of women's babies being torn from their arms and killed, with the husbands scalped and left for dead in the yards. When she was very small, she worried the hordes might return and once again burn the Mohawk and Hudson valleys. When she grew larger she found her schoolmates to be even more fearsome.
The few close friends she had soon moved away, for the western exodus was on and the only people that stayed behind were the very poor or those well off. In some towns throughout the East, the whole middle class vanished. Along with the rich and poor stayed the people that lacked gumption or courage. Sometimes the two words mean nearly the same thing, for the courage of conviction often has a lot to do with starting a job in the first place.
Penelope sometimes wondered if she was to blame for the disappearance of her friends. It seemed that every time she grew close to anyone at all, that person went away. When her grandfather died, she was convinced of it and spent a lot of time after that in a shell. Her mother had her own shell, so why shouldn't she have hers? Once she dared to bring up her land of make
believe to her father, and he boxed her ears soundly and said he had never heard of such foolish thing. For the rest of the years that she spent living at home, she never again confided in her father, not even the most trivial things.
She was a good student to whom good grades came easy, but other pupils saw this as just another reason to keep her from joining their games. Kids can be cruel to misfits, and her schoolmates excelled in making her days miserable. For her age she was quite tall, and the teacher asked her for help in arranging the pupils in their seats as they entered the schoolhouse. As the kids passed by her they chanted, "Stork, stork," until she would have liked to disappear. She ignored their comments as if they didn't bother her, but a deep seated anxiety built in her that stayed inside for years.
Naturally cries of "Teacher's Pet" followed. She was often pelted from out of nowhere with rotten apples. In short, her school years were a horror show that would haunt her for life. Her teacher encouraged her to study so that someday she could be a teacher. Penelope was too timid to take a stand, but she knew there was no way she would ever be a teacher. Her loathing of the school system was something that ate at her. Once out she knew she would never return.
As she grew older, she worked at being plain, so as not to stand out in any crowd. This lack of allure lent people to refer to her as a potential old maid, even to her face. When the other kids started going to dances and ice skating parties, Penelope found a job at the library. With it she found her first contentment in a long time. She was a neat and orderly person, and she found great satisfaction in sorting and grading the books and putting them neatly in order on the shelves. In slow times she was allowed to read to her heart's content, and she took full advantage of this.
The wonders of the universe opened before her, and in truth she lived in a much deeper land of make believe than she had before. Today she might be a queen from Shakespeare's Hamlet, and tomorrow the lady of one of King Arthur's knights. The amazing thing was she still was just as plain, and others ignored her, never guessing of the romantic dreams flowing through her.
One young man named Dominic showed a sudden interest, and her heart swooned. He visited the library several times before asking to escort her to a harvest dance. All her schoolmates would attend this event, and she was naturally apprehensive. Not enough, however. When they arrived a big circle had formed around straw creatures made for the occasion. Penelope was told she was needed to be the stork.
She didn't cry or carry on — she just left, and never spoke to any of her schoolmates ever again. She didn't have to, for she never went back to school. Her parents never inquired about her studies, so they didn't even know she had quit. Instead she picked up a second job for the daytime hours and saved her money like mad.
A month before the other people in her class would graduate, she left her mother a note and left home. She gave her father what he had always given her —
nothing. Originally she had planned on going to New York City, but it would be like her father to feign indignity and come and find her there. So instead she went to Philadelphia, where she worked in a library for one year.
It was a pleasant change that she enjoyed, but she met no friends or suitors there. She rented a room within walking distance, and her little world was still quite sheltered. She watched the ads of the newspapers closely, and when an opening
appeared for a librarian in St. Louis, she jumped at the chance.
For Penelope, St. Louis was a glimpse of people she had only dreamed of. She wasn't sure if it was still the "Gateway to the
West" since the railroads had been built, but it was certainly the meeting point of the country. Eastern
bankers in their tailored suits rubbed elbows with real cowboys in boots and spurs and ten gallon hats. A senator from an eastern state might be wearing a black broadcloth suit with a bowler, and he might be talking with a western representative wearing the same type suit but sporting a cowboy hat with a rattlesnake band and as often as not with a feather stuck in it.
Gamblers from New Orleans and those that stayed on the riverboats wore finery that rivaled that of the royalty of Europe. Penelope found out later that those lace cuffs were large in order to accommodate gambling helpers as well as a mélange of hide out derringers and the like. The strange thing was, the gamblers were as well thought of as any businessman, unless of course he was caught blatantly stealing. Many lawmen and even politicians spent out-of-work times gambling.
There was as much variety of language as of peoples, and walking down the street she might hear English, various Indian dialects, German, French, Spanish, even Chinese. For a girl not long from home it was like living in a fairy tale. Of all the people she saw, the cowboys fascinated her most. With their chaps and spurs, big hats, kerchiefs and
six-guns on their sides, everything they did they did well, from riding to rolling a cigarette with one hand. They were wild and wooly, truly a unique phenomenon.
One evening Penelope took a walk along the river after work, and a cowboy pulled up his horse, dismounted with a flourish, made a sweeping bow with his hat and said, "Good evening, little lady. May I escort you along your way? It might not be safe for a pretty girl like yourself to be walking alone here."
She was flustered, but managed to stammer, "Yes, thank you. I thought there might be a cool breeze along the river."
This meeting didn't amount to much, but on subsequent evening she took to walking that stretch and on several occasions talked to cowboys. She confided with Linda at work about her excursions and Linda simply said, "Why don't you be a mail-order bride?"
Penelope was aghast. "But Linda, You just can't marry a man you have never met."
"But Penny, they are cowboys."
She saw the logic in this and began to scan the ads. She wrote to a couple and was not in fact impressed with the results. One obviously couldn't write, for the letter was in a woman's hand. Another talked only of the brutal work that was expected of her. A third sounded like the man meant to put her to work in a brothel, and she not only threw the letter away, she physically burned it.
About the time that she decided she was meant to be an old maid after all, a letter came from a man named Young, and it was enough to set her imagination racing. He spoke of the fine land he had and the views to be seen from the porch of his house. He had installed all the modern amenities, including water that had a pump inside the house. When he told of how he would sit on the porch in the evening and strum his guitar for her, she felt her heart go out to him. She wrote back and said she couldn't wait to meet him.
In due time a letter arrived with all her tickets in it. He expected to meet her in one month's time at a place called Lee's Ferry. She changed her mind three times daily about going, and her friend Linda had to constantly argue in favor of going before Penny finally said yes. Once decided, she went into a flurry of activity, buying what she imagined would be needed.
On the day of departure she almost turned back from the train, but Linda was there to point her in the westward direction. Once on her way, she was thrilled with her adventure. She had read of the prairies, but still, the sight of the endless flat land instilled a pang of loneliness in her. As the hills and mountains appeared in the distance, she felt she was coming home.
The stage ride was very exciting. A shotgun guard shared the top seat with the driver, and she shared the interior with a rancher and his wife, a salesman, and a young cowboy that had lost his horse in a card game. Apparently the lad worked for the rancher, for when the older man would glower the cowboy would grin and say, " Heck, you were young once, too."
Finally, feeling very dusty and unpresentable, Penelope got off the stage at Lee's Ferry. A big man with a black, neatly trimmed beard left a wagon that had two women on the back seat and came forward to meet her.
Must be his sisters, thought Penelope, and they came along to give him their opinion of
me.
"Hello, you must be Penelope Grimes. I'm Neal Young, and those are two of my other wives."
Other wives! What was this? The girl changed her mind in a hurry. "I'm sorry, I'm going back."
Young just laughed and threw her over his shoulder. "No, you're not. You're coming home with us. Don't worry, you'll fir right in. You'll enjoy it."
At this she began to scream and call to people to get help, to no avail. Soon they had crossed the river and were heading northwest. She didn't know if she would ever see civilization again or not.
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