Although the Reeds had a couple of wagons, the teamsters driving the other one could not be found before sunset; the family was forced to sleep beneath its own dogs for warmth.

[He drinks for a little while.]

A man knows his marriage is in trouble when he looks forward to business trips.

Eleanor, Catherine's much older sister, and Waitstill, my much older brother, had been sweethearts from the time I was born. She was as much a sister to me as my biological ones, but Catherine had always been another matter: she was more like a cousin or an honorary Hastings with a somewhat lesser distinction. She was a follower, worse yet, a shadow—a lesser version of Eleanor.

My other siblings and I used to joke about which one of us Catherine might have been waiting around for—and when Joe lost his first wife, Catherine jumped at the chance. I doubt any one of us would have predicted the match, for reasons starting with the 12-year age difference, but it actually was a fine one. Joe was a stolid type, far and away the least theatrical member of my family... However, even under the best of circumstances, I never would have fit the bill, as far as Catherine was concerned.

Of course, it is never the best of circumstances that inspire such arrangements as the one in which Catherine and I found ourselves.

To be perfectly honest—and, indeed, why stop now?—that horrible first phase of our marriage was on its way out at the end of our first year-and-a-half together. Catherine was finally, genuinely coming around to me and I will grant that her honesty was total—no one has known the meaning of the term "brutal honesty" until he has been married to a McCord girl.

Yet, as far as I was concerned, the damage had been done and it was completely irreparable. Furthermore, as much as I loved my parents, my brothers, my sisters, and my nieces and nephews, I could not abide by the life they had assigned me: it was not mine.

Like Ohio itself, Catherine saddled me with every possible expectation and stoked in me not a single desire as compensation for my pains. Marrying Catherine cut both ways in my decision to leave Ohio: it both forced me into an uncomfortable enough space in which I felt I had no choice but to leave and, in so doing, I alienated the family that had been the one thing tying me to Ohio in the first place. Catherine or no Catherine, it was a state I had been born to flee.

Of course, of course Catherine was finally easing into the marriage! And while, surely, I am not wholly without my charms, I simply submit that only those who come together in marriage can be so perverse! And, of course, Catherine told me she was expecting just as I finalized my plans to "see what kind of life for us I could make on the West Coast."

I was not about to wait.

Without a moment's hesitation, I assured her I was striking out to make the best possible life for the two of us and any children we might have—not just the one she was expecting. I told her I had to go at once to beat winter and that if I waited another year, she might be expecting again. The trip would only grow more difficult the longer I was delayed. I told her I might as well get established.

But, there was no regular mail, she protested! How could she know what she might expect of our future? How would I know what became of her and our firstborn child? With extreme perversity, I am almost positive it was the first time I had ever heard her use that possessive plural pronoun around me, rather than "mine," "yours," or—most horribly—"his," in reference to Joe.

I told her there simply was no time to waste and—and—I suppose this was made easier by the simple fact that Catherine was not yet showing. The fact that she was not showing made my departure far less taxing on me, but the fact that she was with child was what made me more certain than ever that I had to go.