Felicité Petitot, Dec. 27, 1856
Wife of a journeyman, she'd survived
it all: the trek across the breadth
of France from her hamlet in the east
to Paris, seething and cacophonous,
and on to the gray sea she’d never seen
either, at Le Havre, the forty-five days
on the ocean, almost being washed
overboard, filth, frost bite, typhus, hunger,
unloaded like freight at Castle Rock
with $12 and her lace-making bobbins,
the paddle steamer up the Hudson River,
trudging in home-made wooden clogs
through the bush, and on again
over the Great Lakes, dreaming all the while
of getting to the place Wisconsin,
the eighty acres waiting, full of wild fowl,
deer, trout, mandrake fruit and yellow flag;
the river, woods and upland lush
with butternuts and hazel, blackberries,
violets and grapes; not knowing that air
could be like knives, or that the trip
would take so long; landing in Milwaukee
just before her Christmas birthday, 1856,
fifty-five years old, one hundred fifty miles
to go to reach Belleville, Wisconsin,
by ox-drawn wagon through deep snow,
quailing at the wolves howling at night,
shivering with ague, she rode up top,
the men struggling on foot through drifts.
Just twenty miles from what was
to be their home, the driver hit
a tree stump buried in the snow.
The wagon bucked and pitched
her, headfirst, to the frozen ground.
She’d never live to see the pigeons
thick as swarming bees.
—Catherine Jagoe, Madison, WI
