Eternity Read online

  “He won’t be disappointed in me,” Carrie said with a little smile of confidence.

  At this the women sat back in their chairs and looked at Carrie. She was so pretty that everywhere the women went men fell over themselves to get Carrie’s attention. Carrie had a way about her that every woman who saw her would have sold her soul to possess. Men liked Carrie. Men adored Carrie. Maybe being raised with seven older brothers and a father had taught her all there was to know about men. But whatever the reason, the fact was that Carrie could have any man she wanted. All she had to do was choose.

  After two days of trying to “reason” with Carrie, the women gave up. They were tired of talking, and Carrie hadn’t budged an inch. Carrie said that if they were really her friends, they’d help her try to figure out how to get herself married to Mr. Greene so that he couldn’t back out of the marriage when he found out she knew nothing about farming. “He might be a bit, well…upset when he first finds out that I’ve embellished the truth of my abilities. He might be tempted to, maybe, tell me to return home. You can never tell about men. When they think they’ve been wronged, they don’t act rationally so I want to force him to give me a chance to prove to him that I am the perfect wife for him.”

  The women had their opinions of what Mr. Greene would do when he found out that Carrie had lied, connived, plotted, and schemed, all in order to trap him into a marriage that he didn’t want. But Carrie was so determined that after a while they began to try to help her in her plan to deceive Joshua Greene. After all, it was all divinely romantic.

  The first thing they did was try to find out about farming. All of the women had grown up around the sea, and all of them had lived comfortable lives with servants to care for them. Food came from the kitchen, and they had absolutely no idea how it got into the kitchen. Sarah said that a man brought it to the back door of the house.

  With a goal in mind, the women set about researching farming just as they would have done a school project. Within a few days they realized that the subject of farming was very boring, so they asked a woman who came to them looking for a husband to write a sample letter. Carrie copied the letter in her own handwriting and sent a messenger off, at her father’s expense, to take it all the way from Maine to the tiny town of Eternity in Colorado.

  Carrie and her friends had come up with an elaborate story to tell the unsuspecting Mr. Greene about how the woman who was perfect for him had to be married by proxy before she could come to Eternity. If Mr. Greene agreed, all he had to do was sign the enclosed papers, and the marriage would take place in Warbrooke. If he agreed, then when Carrie arrived to meet him she would already be married to him.

  “Your father will never sign the papers,” Euphonia said.

  Carrie knew that she was right. Her father would never allow his youngest daughter to marry a man she’d never met, a man he had not met. He would laugh at her statement that she had fallen in love with a photograph of a man and his two children.

  “I’ll find a way,” Carrie said with more confidence than she felt.

  After she sent the letter to Josh, she had to wait for months for his reply, for even with a messenger on the trip to Colorado, it took a long time for mail to get there and back. She had made a copy of her long letter to him, and as the days went by, she criticized every sentence of it. Maybe she shouldn’t have written this; maybe this sentence should have been left out; maybe she should have included this.

  During the long months of waiting, she may have had her doubts about the letter, but she never once wavered in her conviction that what she was doing was right. Each night she kissed her fingertips and gave kisses to her future family, and every day she thought of them. She purchased fabric to make dresses for the little girl who was going to become her daughter, and she bought a sailboat for the boy. She purchased books, whistles, and boxes of hard rock candy for the children and eight shirts for Josh.

  After six months of waiting, one morning Carrie walked into the old house, and her six friends were standing and waiting for her. With such looks of anticipation on their faces, Carrie didn’t have to be told that Josh’s letter had arrived. Silently, Carrie held out her hand for the letter.

  With trembling hands, Carrie opened it, quickly scanned his letter, then hurriedly looked at the legal papers. As though the air had left her, she sat down hard on a chair. “He signed them,” she said, half in wonder, half in disbelief.

  At first the women didn’t know whether to rejoice or cry.

  Carrie grinned. “Congratulate me. I’m almost a married woman.”

  They congratulated her, but they also let her know that they thought she was crazy, and they couldn’t resist telling her for the thousandth time that Mr. Greene was going to be quite angry when he found out how he’d been tricked.

  Carrie ignored them, for she was delirious with happiness. Now all she had to do was get her father to sign her papers because she was so young, then she had to find a minister to perform the proxy service.

  Carrie handled it all in the same way that she had handled Joshua Greene: She lied.

  She went to the offices of Warbrooke Shipping, which her family owned, and nonchalantly volunteered to deliver a sheaf of papers to her father to be signed. Slipping the proxy papers in with the business papers, her father signed them without reading what he was signing. Money found a minister who would perform the service.

  So, on a late summer morning, one year after the War Between the States had ended, Carrie Montgomery legally became Mrs. Joshua Greene, with Euphonia acting as the stand-in for Josh.

  At the end of the service, Carrie threw her arms around each of her friends in turn and told them that she was going to miss them, but that she was going to be very, very happy in her new life. The women bawled copiously, wetting the front of Carrie’s new dress with their tears.

  “What if he beats you?”

  “What if he drinks?”

  “What if he’s a bank robber or a gambler or he’s been in jail? What if he is a murderer?”

  “You didn’t worry about the hundreds of other women we’ve sent out, why should you worry about me?” Carrie asked, annoyed with the women for not being happy for her.

  Her friends just cried harder into their handkerchiefs.

  To Carrie, all that she’d done so far was easy compared to what she still had to do: tell her parents. When she did tell them, her mother wasn’t nearly as stunned as her father. Her mother gave her husband a look of disgust and said, “I told you that all of you spoiled her, and this is the consequence.”

  Carrie thought her father might start crying. He adored his last child, and it had never crossed his mind that she might grow up, much less marry someone and go hundreds of miles away to live.

  Carrie’s mother suggested that the marriage was illegal and that they could have it annulled. With utter simplicity and absolute conviction, Carrie said, “I will run away.”

  Studying her daughter’s humorless face, her mother nodded. The Montgomery stubbornness was infamous, and she knew that if her daughter had made up her mind to stay married to a man she’d never met, then she would stay married.

  “I wish ’Ring were here,” her father said, speaking of his oldest son.

  Carrie shuddered. Had her oldest brother been there, she would have waited until he left before presenting the fact of her marriage to her softhearted parents. Her oldest brother was not softhearted nor particularly indulgent of his sister’s schemes. In fact, Carrie would not have told her parents while any of her brothers were home.

  “I don’t see that there’s anything we can do,” her father said sadly. “When will you leave?” His voice was heavy with tears.

  “As soon as I can pack,” Carrie answered.

  Her mother squinted at her youngest child. “And what do you plan to take to this wilderness?”

  “Everything,” Carrie said in answer to what she thought was an odd question. “I plan to take everything that I own.”

  At that, h