Milwaukee and Dahlia-June
1846, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA๋ ࣭°‧🫧⋆.ೃ࿔*:･𓂃 ོ☼𓂃°‧🫧⋆.ೃ࿔*: ⭑ ࣭°‧🫧⋆.ೃ࿔*:･𓂃 ོ☼𓂃°‧Milwaukee and Dahlia-June
If you stand on the pier when the sun’s high and the lake is a slab of bright pewter, you can hear the whole town breathing. In summer Milwaukee is thriving with merchants as well as fishermen alike. The steamships come and go, their whistles rolling across the water. Smaller watercraft race to keep up with the quakes the big tug boats make. Boys race along the docks with bare feet, the smell of fish and coal and fresh-cut lumber thick in the air.To visitors and gypsies perhaps the fish isoff putting even, under that bustle there’s an easy rhythm: doors opening early, shutters drawn back, women calling to each other across yards about preserves, weddings and whose baby finally slept through the night.I’m Eustace Logan. Twenty-two and born to this city’s wind and work. We do not live in a house that leans a little to the left. Or even a farmer’s nice set up. No, we have it good in this big city we callhome. We own a nice dockside estate on the more private part of the lake. My father, Hank, comes in at dusk with hands black as the timbers he loads and the patience of someone who knows the world rewards steady labor.
My mother, Margot, sews by lamplight until the seams are pristine. Mama talks to fabric as if it were a person and stitches mending old wounds the heart seems to pick upas you age.Mid-summer is a kindly season for a town that knows how to work. The fields out past the last rows of clapboard hum with bees; apples are fattening on their branches and folks from the outskirts bring bushels in on wagons drawn by stout horses, though there are mules here and there for the heavier loads. Of course it’s not apples they harvest here. No corn, corn is this parts trade.That and fish, and perhaps the two will last for hundreds of years to come. The Winthrops’ wagon smells of rope and burlap; the Kowalskis’ cart smells of dried meats in bulk in the heat, even through all those wooden boxes before they are called onto The Great Lake for trades. Horses are the main form of transportation. Pulling fish boxes, hauling grain to the mills, their breath steaming in the cool mornings and their flanks dappling in the noon heat.Women everywhere are gleaming with the season. They gather the loose miracles of summer, the last of the strawberries as the appels have only yet flirted with being ripe, the river of herbs spilling from small garden beds and women set to canning and preserving.
Yes, day to day life was mundane for us in Wisconsin, but it was home all thesame.Mason jars click under hands browned by the sun; ladies in gingham and lace lean over steaming kettles, mouths smiling around the work. There’s gossip folded into each boil as there is corn in those fields! Even folks who haven’t much money will trade a jar of pickled onions for a dress hem or a lesson in reading at the schoolhouse.
Weddings come in waves when the days are this bright. Bells ring from the little church on Third and Walnut; the air smells of fried dough and pipe smoke and too-much-sweet syrup. People dance in the street with boots scuffed and skirts puffed. Clara Winthrop with her proper posture and the kind of laugh that would start an argument about reform in the morning and make you forget it by supper.The Winthrops themselves are the sort of family everyone nods to: Charles with his mercantile ledger and Eliza with her quiet plans for help and comfort. Henry, the eldest, walks about with a law book tucked under his arm as if it’s a sleeping child; Samuel is the one who hauls bundles and knows which box has the sturdier rope.Then there are other faces sewn into the town’s everyday quilt: the Kowalskis, who come in from the brewery smelling of hops and good work, their children always with dirt at their knees and clever eyes; the O’Connors, whose songs spill from the taverns and get the town stomping; the Thompsons, precise and steady, Samuel the barber always ready with a nod and a razor. He also doubled as the Sunday preacher as well. Differences flatten in these long, hot afternoons.Everyone’s hands are raw from work, everyone’s shirt is damp, and everyone appreciates a stretch of shade.In the year of Our Lord’s 1846, in the middle of my summer, Dahlia-June Léger arrived the way color to leaves in the fall does, softly... Her hair caught the sun the way smoke does when you hold it up to light. Her skin was this dark olive and her hair was like dusty ash in messy ringlets. I had always thought my pals were full of turkey feathers when they said they had fallen in love at first sight.Until I met her.
Our Lord in heaven, the way everything stands still and that heart in the thing doctors call a ribcage just slams about like a train engine with fresh coal in it. That’s what happened the first time I saw her! There was intent in her steps, this… Quiet elegance that drew the eye eve among the grit of the docks. Her mother, Miss Anhua carried the quiet confidence of someone who had seen more to life than good and kept the good parts anyways. I can’t tell you even for certain how we all knew it in those steps but we did. Weeks later that was the gossip of town. Not the fact Miss Dahlia-June was clumsy with the peaches at the weekend market.They had come to town with satchels of herbs and fingers scented faintly of rue and rosemary, ready to help women bring babies into the world and stitch away a fever. Rosalinn little awe-eyed Rosalinn : tugs at the skirts of any adult she meets, asking why the lake is so wide. Or other things that preoccupy the minds of five year olds. Hard work seems to drift out.Jojo, who’s fifteen and full of that hopeful clumsiness his older sister shared, shoulders a plank grinning all about when he helps move lumber onto freight ships.I first saw Dahlia-June at the market, bent low over a stall of peaches. The sun caught her cheek, scattering freckles along her deep olive skin.
She wore a dress the color of damp moss after rain, the hem dusted from the road. Her dark hair was drawn back with a green ribbon that matched her eyes, though a few strands had escaped and curled soft against her temple. She reached for a peach, and her sleeve white cotton with tiny pin-tucks brushed the top of the neat pyramid, sending half of them tumbling into the dirt.I think it was the first time I had ever even noticed the eyes of another woman. Or how someone could move sogracefully. She was a stranger to our busy town but we always had strangers in Millawaukee. “Mercy, ma’am,” Mr. Ganders said, stooping with surprising speed for a man with a bad knee. His straw hat shaded eyes the color of a half-worn penny. “Ain’t but a few folks I’d forgive for bruisin’ my best fruit. New comers like yourself are of course being the brunt of that!”“I am truly sorry, sir,” she replied, each syllable even and careful, her voice carrying just enough to make heads turn from the next stall over. He grinned, brushing the dust from one peach with the corner of his apron. I stepped in to help pick up peaches and dust them off with my own summer shirt. “Any woman with eyes like that could spill the whole cart and I’d still sell her the sweetest one.”
She laughed at my terrible joke hile Iin turn, had been shocked at the words that escaped my very own lips.There was nothing fancy about me besides my last name and upbringing; brown hair kept short because it wouldn’t do anything else, boots that took most of winter’s pay to mend, and a shirt too thin for the season. I never did get much that wasn’t earned, even with my upbringing.This stranger to my eyes didn’t have the clipped step of city women, nor the hurried shuffle of farmers’ wives. She moved like she was part flower, part human. Her green eyes flashed against her deep olive skin, and it did something to a man. Even the peach seller felt it.“Eustace Logan,” I managed to say as I took her now free hand and shook it firmly. “From this good city of Milwaukee, born and raised anyways.”“I am Miss Dahlia-June,” she said, and it rolled off her tongue like she’d just recited something important.“No place in particular, though my mama would claim New Orleans is the place our kinship found some freedom.” When she said her mama would claim New Orleans, I thought of the way folks talked about that city. I had never been there I had only heard the things like it was hot, loud, smelling of river mud and rum, full of French words an trouble. I’d heard of free people of color there, some born to liberty, some buying it dear.
Some of them had even some here underground to find equality.I’d never have noticed it until she spoke. I’d pictured them all in bright silks, with gold at their ears and laughter you could hear over the clatter of dice in the gambling halls. Miss Dahlia-June wasn’t that picture.She didn’t shout her beauty or dress it in finery; her gown was simple, though the green of it caught the light like moss after rain. She spoke soft, like she knew her words would be heard without being flung. It was in the same moment that a soft pale yellow butterfly landed on her nose that I knew I wanted to marry her someday. There was a steadiness to her, a poise that made the noise in my head go still.After that, I found a dozen reasons to cross her path.
I’d help Mr. Ganders unload crates so I could hand her a basket. She’d stop by the mercantile for thread, and I’d suddenly remember I needed rope. That was just the way of it. The town keeps youhonest.You learn to read a person’s story in the way they walk in the whiteness of a collar, the fray of a cuff, the smallness of a stitch. You can tell who’s new by how they step around puddles and who’s been here a long time by the way they greet the lake. Miss Dahlia-June has a walk that speaks of other rivers and other summers; sometimes I find myself thinking the lake must be jealous.
She told me all kinds of stories our first summer. About the swamps in her home and night majik the other free folks in her area. Her mother would pack us a lunch by the end of that summer everyday that we met in the mercantile. After we ate each day, I would hitch the wagon and take her to the train station.
From there, she traveled from town to town with her mother’s satchels of herbs, midwifing for the local townships around us. Someone always needed something whether it was salves and oils, or help bringing a new life into the world. It seemed a baby wasalwaysbeing born.Now, on nights when the work is done and the women’s laughter quiets to soft calls across porches, I walk the pier. The moon spills across the lake like torn silver, and the town’s noises are down to the honest ones: the creak of a rope, the thump of a crate, the distant dog that thinks itself a night watchman.I find myself wondering about the future in those moments. Will there be tin roofs on more houses? Will the Winthrop girls teach in a school the whole town can be proud of? Will Dahlia-June stay and teach me the names of the wild herbs?Life in the summer tastes like honey:good and thick. The jars will keep clicking in the pantry, and tomorrow the women will be out gleaning along the orchard paths, gathering what the sun leaves behind. I walk with my hands in my pockets and the knowledge that this place.Its labor and laughter, its outhouses and orchards, its horses and its songs…
Is where I want to stay.
