East to the Dawn by Susan Butler Page B

in my own ears.’ ”
    Her health was a hallmark of her personality. In this she was unlike her mother, who though fit, had been stricken with so many assaults on her health. It was as if Maria’s genes had jumped the generations in-between. Even Amelia’s teeth were unusually strong; her first tooth came in at four months, on the early side, and she never had a cavity until she was twenty. She managed to avoid most of the childhood contagious diseases; in those prevaccine days the only illness she succumbed to was measles, for which she had an early and healthy respect. When her thirty-one-year-old cousin Ruth Martin came to visit, Amelia, even though only seven, ignoring the ordinary rules of conduct, warned the family, “Don’t go near Cousin Ruth. She’s got measles at her house.” And she stood across the
room until Ruth left. In her instinctive awareness of health precautions that should be taken and her personal fitness, Amelia was such a throwback to her great-grandmother Maria that one imagines Amelia Otis would have noted it and been comforted.
    She learned to read at five and after that spent hours in the Otises’ library devouring the back issues of Harper’s Magazine for Young People, or reading the novels of Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. Hawthorne, too, she read, but she thought him too given to description. (“Why doesn’t he say Judge Pyncheon’s dead in that chair,” she fumed.) She could also at least get glimpses of the world beyond Atchison in the New York and Chicago newspapers and in Harper’s Weekly, which also came to the house.
    She was thin—so thin her friends sometimes called her Skinny—and growing up was always on the tall side for her age. She had freckles, level gray eyes, a round nose, and straight dark blond hair parted in the middle. Photos of her show her hair drawn smoothly back in pigtails and tied with the enormous ribbon bows fashionable at the time.
    There in Atchison Amelia grew up secure of her place, secure of her family’s position, nurtured by tradition, and surrounded by friends. Every one of the friends she would mention in later life were the ones she made then, in Atchison, and all would remain her best friends for as long as she lived.
    Yet if she was raised in a family that had achieved local, state, and national recognition, still its day, like Atchison’s, was past; in Amelia’s growing-up years, Atchison was subsiding into a sleepy town. Gone was the vibrancy of the years when Amy was growing up. In its 1880s exuberance—its certainty that it was about to become the gateway to the West—a sign had been put up at the railroad station that read, “Atchison Kansas population 30,000,” strategically placed so that passengers in the trains approaching from the south could see it before they turned west to go out across the Kansas plains. In Amelia’s day the sign was still there, but now it served only as a reminder of past dreams. The population was scarcely half that. The famous of the world no longer strolled through town as they had when her mother was a child. The most exciting thing going on in town was to watch Deefie Bowler—the deaf and dumb brick-layer with the powerful shoulders and crippled stumps for legs, famous throughout Kansas for being able to lay more bricks than anyone else in America-finish paving the outlying roads.
    It must have seemed to Amelia as if the whole world were connected either by blood or by marriage—all bound together by the intertwined linkage that grew out of fifty years of common history. When she was three, she would have been present when the far-flung Challiss clan gathered in
the Challiss house next door for Mary Ann and William’s golden wedding anniversary, when they were remarried by the Baptist minister Dr. Comes with all ten children in attendance. She would get to know her august great-aunt Ida Challiss