élégie

By Eva Seyler

Brought from Minnesota to Oregon as a mail-order bride in 1913, the new Mrs. Pearson has to face her husband's hostile family and find joy where she can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Issoria Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988087700

Eva Seyler

Eva was born in Jacksonville, Florida. She left that humidity pit at the age of three and spent the next twenty-one years in California, Idaho, Kentucky, and Washington before ending up in Oregon, where she now lives on a homestead in the western foothills with her husband and five children, two of whom are human. Eva cannot remember a time when she couldn’t read, and has spent her life devouring books. In her early childhood years, she read and re-read The Boxcar Children, The Trumpet of the Swan, anything by Johanna Spyri or A A Milne, and any issues of National Geographic with illustrated articles about mummified, skeletonised, and otherwise no-longer-viable people. As a teenager she was a huge fan of Louisa May Alcott and Jane Eyre. As an adult she enjoys primarily historical fiction (adult or YA) and nonfiction on a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to, history, disaster, survival, dead people, and the reasons people become dead. Audiobooks are her jam, and the era of World War One is her historical pet. Eva began writing stories when very young and wrote almost constantly until she was 25, after which she took a years-long break before coming back to pursue her old dream of becoming a published author for real. She loves crafting historical fiction that brings humanity to real times and events that otherwise might seem impersonal and distant, and making doodles to go with them. When Eva is not writing, she is teaching her human children, eating chocolate, cooking or baking, wasting time on Twitter, and making weird shrieky noises every time she sees her non-human children.

Book preview

prelude

Junction City Station

Oregon

June 1913

For days and days the singing tracks have carried me

east to west

But here on this platform the tracks have gone silent

north to south

Gleaming and glinting in the shimmering June sun

I am alone

Waiting for a farmer to come who knows my face

I don’t know his

I hug my handbag to my chest and wait

Anxiously

    wait

pace

I could sit down on the bench in the shade

But I can’t

      be

still

What if he’s old and hideous?

Sun-leathered skin,

temper like the lash

of a broken piano string.

What if he’s kind out of pity?

Once he sees

how unsuited I am,

too kind to send me back again,

Disappointed all the same

in this bargain

he’s too good

to renege on.

Because I’ve never been a farmer's wife

or a mother

or cooked a meal.

Mormor is gone. 

Mormor was my world, the only family I ever knew.

After my parents died,

she took me into her elegant, shady house:

the house that ran down as I grew up,

because all the money she had left

she poured into music lessons for me.

Years and years, all the best teachers

Minneapolis had to offer

climbing up

reaching for

the scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory

that finally came.

And we made ready for me to go this fall.

But then she died, at the end of March,

and I was left with nobody,

no prospects,

and it seemed too risky to go.

And I had to send that letter

signed with tears

saying

I couldn’t

accept

I broke my own heart

bit down my pride

found an advertisement

from a man in Oregon

who asked for a bride

a good Swedish bride

to care for his children

because his wife died.

I sent him a photograph

he sent me the rail fare

I packed my things

and left Minneapolis the next day.

I can care for his children, but what good will I be to him?

In the station window I pause and see my reflected self

me in my impractical plum poplin travelling suit

Mormor’s dainty pearls swinging from my ears

a head full of music and hands that have worked piano keys,

never a washboard or a hoe

feet that easily dance over organ pedals,

never fields of hay or gardens to be gathered

I turn away, choking on tears

at the life I could have had

and now never will.

If I’m crying when he comes,

I will tell him

it is the hot and dusty summer air.

Heat shimmering off the gleaming rails

haymaking haze on the horizon

I long for cool clear water

but I am too shy to ask the stationmaster

who keeps looking at me

with a face I can’t read

north to south

and south to north

the soft percussive clicking of my heels on the platform

waiting

unable to be still

subject

Miss Berglund?

I whip round to face a man,

lanky and sunburnt.

He removes his hat.

His damp hair falls over his forehead,

lit by the sun

to the warm colour of

the hayfields and the haze,

And he smiles, a bit shy.

I suppose this isn’t awkward only for me.

He says again,

Miss Berglund?

And I say yes.

"I’m Louis Pearson.

Everyone calls me Lou.

You can too."

The hand he offers is work-rough

strong

          steady