I haven't written in here for a very long time. I reached a point where I felt like I was either complaining, or discussing the same topics, ad-nauseum. Mother Bee caught a miserable chest complaint. Now Billy has also gained it. He's not the same bright, can't sit still for two minutes, Billy. He is quiet most of the time. He has lost weight. His skin is pallid. The worst is that his spirit seems so repressed. It is as though the illness has swallowed the brightness of his soul.
He has now joined mother Bee in the wagon. Sometimes he rides the little mule that Papa Aidan brought with us. The mule is almost as thin as Billy.
It has become miserably hot. There is no rain. The edibles that the animals usually eat have dried up and drifted away. So now...the animals are hungry, the humans are hungry, and I fear that some of the animals will wind up being somebodies meal. Papa Aidan has become even more watchful over our few remaining animals. I can tell that he recognizes the danger. We had a dozen laying hens when we began our journey. There are only three left. We ate six of the others, and three mysteriously disappeared from their pen on the side of the wagon during the night. I'm surprised that the other chickens didn't create such a fuss that it awakened all of us. I guess we sleep so soundly after a day filled with exertion we didn't even awaken for that.
There is still no word from Tom. I try to believe that if there were anyway to send us word, he would. I don't really believe that. I think the iea of going to war is so thrilling to him that he gives very little thought to those of us on this miserable journey. He left us behind when we so desperately needed him. I fear that I will be bitter about that for the the rest of our married life, if he ever does return.
I'm not going to call my diary Felicia anymore. It's a childish idea and there is nothing left of childishness on this desperate, hot, miserable, nauseating track. It WOULD help if I had joy for the end of the trail to urge me on. I don't know this Astoria that we're traveling to. It sounds frightening more than anything else. I'm pretty certain that it's not a safe place to homestead and raise a family. What on earth possessed Tom to buy a pig in a poke? He had no idea what our property would be, beyond "One hundred acres of the most fertile earth God ever created." That was the promotion that he succumbed to. For a man with virtually no imagination Tom can be ridiculously gullible.
I met the salesman once. I immediately felt that something was wrong about him. I couldn't give an exact description of what I thought was wrong. That meant that Tom dismissed me. He didn't even try to look at the idea from my point of view. Honestly, if he repeats one more time that "Women don't have the intellect to deal with finances..." there may be another war....in our home!" Is it a civil war when a wife goes to battle with her husband?
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