Far Away Home by Susan Denning

like an invitation, lay the nation’s virgin land yet to be inhabited
and exploited by humans and their hopes. It stole her breath to think of the
possibilities. She looked to Johnny, his head lolling against the back of the
seat with his eyes closed and his mouth open, and decided her thoughts and her
destiny were her own.
    By Davenport,
Aislynn had traveled enough for one day. Her body ached from hours of
bone-rubbing bouncing and swaying. The sounds, the smells and the sight of her
fellow passengers irritated her. Aislynn and Johnny disembarked at the station.
    They found a
family who took in boarders. The house appeared clean, and they were promised
beds although they would have to share them with the family’s children. Aislynn
agreed. She crawled into a soft, warm bed and was joined by three girls younger
than herself. Two were small, but the thirteen-year-old seemed nearly as large
as Johnny. The younger ones passed the night kicking and throwing their limbs
in every direction. One woke crying three times to no one’s notice but
Aislynn’s. Between the child’s sobs, she could hear the house sleeping. She
pulled her pillow over her head, but it yielded no relief. She lay wakeful and
heard the clock in the parlor strike three. Exhaustion won out. However, with
the morning, she woke weary.
    The train
pressed on another full day to Omaha, the Union Pacific’s town. It was built
for and around the railroad. Beyond the train cars and the rails radiating out
from the station, a small clapboard city with dirt roads bloomed on the gently
rolling plains. When their train pulled into the station complex, she pleaded
for a meal and some sleep. They found lodging in two rooms behind a tavern. The
larger room housed men, and women shared the smaller. There were two beds in
the tiny women’s room, and Aislynn shared hers with a stranger. The woman spent
the night squirming and scratching. Aislynn kept to one side of the bed with
her shawl pulled over her head and her coat closed around her, hoping to ward
off any loose bugs traveling her way. In the morning, while the others ate
breakfast, Aislynn took two beakers of water and washed her hair and her body
with brown lye soap. It left her skin dry and taut, but she hoped it removed
any critters before they took up residence.
    The rail trip
west from Omaha provided a train car with fewer amenities. Slats of wood served
as seats. Windows were frozen in various levels of open. A stove sat untended
and the lamps unlit. Passengers were more male and less civil. Scenery was
extraordinary in its sameness. Huge fields with scatterings of small white or
brown houses repeated themselves for miles.
    As they neared
North Platte, Johnny noticed Aislynn’s discomfort and suggested they get off
the train. She appreciated his offer and assured him they had enough money for
the expenditure. Johnny shrugged and said the money did not matter.
    While the train
idled for fifteen minutes, they raced to the hotel. No rooms were available,
but a hotel worker referred them to a boarding house. There, the owner offered
them accommodations behind the tavern. They would have to share their beds with
one other person, but Aislynn agreed. While Johnny went for a drink, Aislynn
trotted off with the landlady.
    In the
log-walled, sod-roofed room, she found two shelves of bunks suspended between
the wall and two posts of stripped tree trucks. Each bed stretched only four
feet long, but they held clean, white ticks stuffed with pine needles giving
the room a fresh scent. These mattresses were topped with fluffy quilts in
immaculate duvets. Aislynn crawled into her top bunk and fell into a deep
sleep. Sometime later, she awakened when a rough woman climbed onto her bed.
The woman had no teeth and skin splotched with thick black patches. Her smell
made Aislynn cringe. She hid her face in her pillow and tried to breathe. When
the woman removed her old boots, the room reeked with an odor so offensive
Aislynn could