A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick Read Free Book Online Page B

meetings, Jessie Otis, then a mere sixteen-year-old girl, had found him dashing and charming. He could make her laugh. He had a sweet smile and eyes as calm as Lake Winona on a still summer day. She could sink into those eyes. He was “going places” her father had told her. He had “property,” small cottages in Winona and a photographic studio in St. Charles a few miles away. He was a quick study, her father said, would learn photography in a snap.
    They married on February 17, 1891, just a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday, and before long he bought out Grover Studio in Winona along with its enormous set of glass plate negatives, which her father said would make Mr. Bauer good money, all those pictures of landscapes that people wanted. Mr. Bauer had turned a good number of them into postcards once the postal service permitted both the address and a message to be written on the same side, leaving the opposite side for photographs. Some people still sent leather postcards, but Mr. Bauer was sure that would stop soon enough, though sometimes his “vision of the future” didn’t ring true. He said it was the timing of things that allowed an idea to become a practice one could pursue toward perfection. But sometimes timing took away a vision too. Donald had been taken from her by an inexplicable moment of tragically bad timing. She pressed her hand to her heart. Donald’s memories wore heavily.
    Like a tablecloth unfurled, she lowered herself onto the divan with its claw feet and oak arms she could grip, her linen skirt settling over her knees. She liked the cool of the wood. It gave her strength, which she desperately needed to accomplish her tasks. But today the carved wood offered her no force. She aimlessly turned pages of a book, not remembering anything she’d read. She was vaguely conscious of birds outside the window chattering. Or was it neighborhood boys playing? Russell had come home from school, donned his playing knickers, and headed out the back door, barely stopping to give her a peck on her cool cheek. That was just as well. She didn’t like displays of affection, even from an eight-year-old.
    Paper cut her finger and she stood, sucking on it, aware of the salty taste. At least she could notice it. She sighed and went to the cupboard where her husband kept his salve. His mixture did actually soothe. It was too bad that J. R. Watkins sold a product much like it. Watkins’s business had taken off when he moved it to Winona in 1885. Once, in a flash of argument, her husband had hinted that Watkins and he worked on a salve formula together, but Mrs. Bauer really doubted that. She wasn’t sure why. Her husband was a truthful man. As far as she knew. Still, they remained acquainted with the Watkins family, her husband having taken the great man’s photograph, which the company placed on a postcard and used for promotion. The Bauers didn’t exactly socialize with them, nor with the lumber people like the Lairds and Nortons. They weren’t in that class. But they’d attended the funeral of Mary Ellen, JR’s wife, when she passed in April 1904. It was the same year as Donald’s accident. She gasped a stuttered breath. She hated it when everything she thought of in a day seemed to come back to sweet Donald and the great emptiness of his death.
    She looked for cleanser to clean the wound. Her husband was always a step behind other businessmen who prospered. Oh, they had a comfortable life, but he’d made investments in the salve, kept detailed ledgers, but nothing really came of the orders. A few were shipped, mostly to North Dakota and Seattle, where Watkins’s products weren’t so easily acquired. Mr. Bauer had seen military duty in the West and remembered the prairies, liked them, left behind the salve with some friends there, south of Bismarck. He received a few orders after that.
    He’d left so much more behind in North Dakota.
    Everyone had urged them to have another child as soon as they