Part Two: Pearl

She shuffled her feet on the cobblestones. It was Thursday afternoon, and she was decked out in her Sunday best, waiting for the train. Her Sunday go-to-meeting dress was lacking in frills compared to what the ladies wore around her at the train station. They hadn’t noticed her. She felt invisible, and she was thankful.

“Better to be invisible than to be laughed at,” she concluded.

John and Mary O’Leary hadn’t raised any high-in-society children. They had taught their children to work hard and do what was right. They also taught them how to sing and play the instruments of the blue ridge mountains and the songs that only the mountain people could sing. The eastern Tennessee mountain people had a style all their own. Singing and playing were leisure evening activities for the whole family at the end of a long work day. It just made the world seem right as the sun was going down. In the summer, they played on the front porch. In the winter, they played in the parlor.

She was raised on a farm with nine siblings. Four boys and six girls. She was a country-to-the-bone farm girl on her way to help her great aunt. The previous week, her parents received a letter from her mom’s aunt, Helen Franz. She was getting on in years and decided to ask for someone young with enough energy to provide the care she needed to come to help her around her place. Her parents believed in taking care of those in need, especially kin. All the other children were either married, engaged to be married, or too young to go by themselves, and the only one who could go was Pearl. She was nervous because she had never made it out of her little corner of the world before now.

John and Mary drove their daughter from their rural Tennessee farm to the quaint downtown of Newport, Tennessee, to meet the train. It was hard to part ways with their daughter. She was traveling several hundred miles away after all. They were relieved that she wasn’t going to the far West where the Indians and Outlaws were rampaging and killing settlers, or at least that’s what they’d heard was happening.

It was going to take two or three days to make the trek across the state of Tennessee, the Mississippi River, and Missouri. Thankfully, the horse and wagon days were slowly making way for the power of the steam locomotive. It would be a little easier on the mind and body.

She had packed up what few belongings she owned and a couple of the instruments she had learned to play as a little girl. She needed to keep music in her life if at all possible. Music was a part of her. Her daddy carried the luggage through the little train station to the bench beside the tracks, where she would wait for the train. She didn’t know when she would see her parents again, but she didn’t expect her great aunt to outlive the remainder of the decade. She thought she could be back home in Eastern Tennessee in a couple of years, but until then, she would work hard and give Helen her best effort in caring for her and her place.

If she was honest, she didn’t know exactly what awaited her in Missouri. Helen’s husband had passed away ten years previously, and she had sold most of the cattle and farm equipment. She heard her parents say something about Helen selling some of her acreages to a neighbor. Some man named Sid. She thought most of her work would be inside the house, but she could do the outside work too. She’d had her fair share of herding cattle and mending fences when daddy and the boys had too much to handle. They all did whatever they could to help each other, but her area of expertise was in the kitchen. She was adept at churning, pickling, baking, and cleaning. Her dream in life was to have a home of her own someday with children running around laughing and playing. She wanted a husband who wasn’t afraid to work and would love her with every fiber of his being. Those dreams just hadn’t worked out yet.

Pearl was a beautiful young woman with long, dark chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes were a hazy light blue. Several young men had looked in those blue eyes and become stuttering fools. Other young men looked at her and felt sure they could secure her love and devotion, which never seemed to work out the way they planned. People were beginning to talk about her being an old maid. She wasn’t married, not because she was ugly, and not because no one wanted to marry her, but because she had this way about her that didn’t put up with nonsense.

When she was fifteen, the oldest Tillman boy thought he’d have a go at winning her heart. His definition of winning a girl’s heart was being handsy and, at some point, securing a kiss. He had leaned in for one during his attempt at seducing her, only to be met with fiery opposition. He had been trying to get too close all evening and had been thoroughly warned. His final attempt at facial connection was thwarted with her fist upside his jaw. While he lay sprawled out on the ground, she lectured him on how he ought to treat a lady. “Don’t force a lady to do something she doesn’t want to do!” she had said firmly. Her mama told her later that it wasn’t very ladylike to punch a man; she contested that it wasn’t very gentlemanly for him to try to force himself on her. She had her mind made up about how a man was going to treat her. And she stuck to her guns.

She wasn’t outspoken, nor did she speak out of turn. She didn’t gossip. She was truthful to a fault. She whole-heartedly believed that plain talk was easily understood. Many other suitors tried to thrill her with their looks or wealth, but she had yet to meet someone who impressed her. And she had told each prospective suitor as much. The result was that she was still single at twenty-two. And that was all right.

She looked at her surroundings, trying to take in the sights of the small town. She hadn’t been away from the farm often, and this was as big a city as she had ever seen. Newport was a small town of seven-hundred people, but it felt huge compared to the sparse population she was accustomed to for her entire life. Their closest neighbor was a mile away across the corn fields. Occasionally, strangers meandered down their little country road, but it wasn’t very often. She felt overtaken by the exposure to this many people at once. It was almost too much to bear. The experience of traveling so far from home and being left alone here gave her an uneasy feeling. Pearl was friendly and outgoing enough, but this was altogether different. She couldn’t wait to be in the tiny train car speeding out to the country. But she was going to try to enjoy every part of her journey. She tried to process all of these new sensations and keep them from overwhelming her. She kept reminding herself to take it slow and easy.
As she sat on the bench at the train station, the afternoon sun bore down on her. She had been waiting for forty-five minutes when she heard the whistle. The one o’clock train was coming around the bend. The time had come to depart her beloved, familiar homeland.

Pearl stood up and brushed the front of her dress with her hands. She was ready for her new adventure.

Five hundred miles away, Sid rode his horse down the narrow country lane skirting the field. The owner of a neighboring farm down the road had sent word requesting that he come by because she had a favor to ask of him. He’d do just about anything for Mrs. Franz, but he didn’t know what lay ahead for him in the next few days.