Free Impatient With Desire by Gabrielle Burton Page B

claim Texas, but the girls wouldn’t have had enough folks around them.”
    We walked in silence for a while, then I stopped. “In her last letter, my sister, Betsey, asked me if my wandering feet will rest this side of the grave. I might ask you that question, Mr. Donner.”
    “My movings are over,” he said. He looked deep into my eyes. “I find no place so much to my mind as this.”
    I held the gaze.

George Building His Wall, 1839
    O ur courtship was brief, and more was not needed. It still sometimes surprises me that I, who had never planned to marry, married twice, and to two Southerners, both from North Carolina, both steady and measured, with honey voices and quick laughs. I have no doubt that my two husbands would have liked each other—sometimes I think George is exactly the kind of man Tully would have grown into had he lived.
    I never expected nor tried to find another man after Tully, who valued me as much as himself, but the afternoon I watched George build the stone wall where his farm faced the road, I knew I would marry him. He spread a tarp on the ground, a quilt over that, near an apple tree, and we ate fresh apples and talked easily.
    “I’m very fond of stone fences, Mr. Donner,” I said. “They’re unusual in this part of the country.”
    “My father is fond of them too,” he said. “When I was a boy, he talked often about them. He was a militiaman in New Hampshire, and they saved his life more than once.” He laughed. “Anyone can build a stone fence in the East. It’s much more of a challenge here.”
    A large pile of stones of all sizes lay next to a cart filled with more stones, some he had wrested from a fallow field, others left over from the new statehouse in Springfield. He went regularly to Springfield to hear the Members of the Legislature speak, and asked if I’d like to accompany him sometime. After mentioning with amusement that one well-known Member was a charlatan and a windbag, he wasn’t sure which was worse, he became engrossed in the work. I must admit I quickly stopped correcting my papers and became engrossed in watching him.
    He looked carefully at the partially finished wall, looked at the stones that ranged from perhaps five pounds to fifty, then back at the wall, before selecting a stone from the pile. He lifted the huge boulders easily—and I have always admired physical strength manifested with grace in a man—yet he chose the smaller stones with a craftsman’s care, testing the heft of the stone in his hands, feeling its planes and grooves, before choosing the place on the wall he wanted it to be, several times trying one, two, or three places before being satisfied. He checked both sides of the wall for precision. “Each stone should cast a shadow,” he said. He didn’t build the wall in order—in some places it was a foot high, two feet in others—the stones determined its order. “It’s really an art, Mr. Donner,” I said. “It’s pretty simple, Mrs. Dozier,” he said. “One over two, two over one.” He was in no hurry nor rush—I would come to understand that he cared more about the building than the completion—and my heart said, I will cast my lot with this calm, deliberative man who cares about the fit and rightness of things.
    A month later when he asked, “Mrs. Dozier, could you ever see your way into a future with me?” I answered readily, “I am already there, Mr. Donner.”

Jan 22nd 1847
    I n the beginning of course we were on ground level, but now we are underground inside walls of snow. We’re not sure how much snow has fallen—twenty feet?—but from the poles Jean Baptiste thrusts into the ground, we estimate the snowpack at twelve feet. Near the opening of our shelter, we began with three carved snow stairs, and now there are eleven. George figured out an ingenious plan. After a storm, I pace out the number of steps from “the fireplace” to our “front door,” then Jean Baptiste, whose stride is not much longer