A Light in the Wilderness (14 page)

“Some of us are gathering in a circle for our morning fundamentals,” Nancy told her. “Come with us? Maryanne’s watching Nancy Jane for me.”

“Until you mentioned it, I’s doin’ well.” Letitia rubbed her belly. “But now I’s feelin’ the pressure.” She grinned. Davey told her she needed to get more kindred, as he called it.

They followed a group of women laughing as they formed a loose circle, their backs to each other holding wide their skirts fluffled with many petticoats, making their waists look small as a wagon hub. As they approached, Nancy waved at her mother and introduced herself to the rest of the group.

“Come on over.” One of the women let loose her skirt and motioned them in. She had a pockmarked face and a broken front tooth. “Slip in right over here.” The woman moved to make room.

“That’s my daughter,” Patsy Hawkins said, turning into the circle. “By marriage. Couldn’t ask for a better one.”

“I didn’t see you over there, Mama Hawkins.”

“You didn’t recognize my backside?” The women laughed, a banter like quail chatter pecked the clear air.

“This is Letitia Carson.” Nancy settled in beside her mother, motioning for Letitia to join them.

Letitia felt the pressure of making water and took a step forward.

“She can wait ’til last.” A stout woman with a clean white apron over her pink-flowered calico held up her hand to hold Letitia back. “Out there.” She pointed.

Letitia felt a burn rise up. She’d forgotten for a moment, thought she belonged when she didn’t. The baby kicked at a greater need to relieve herself.
Just step away; hold your water.
She adjusted the kerchief she tied at the back of her neck, lifted her thick hair off her neck, willed her body to comply.
Please. Not now.

Then the first trickling down her legs. She wanted to disappear into the dirt beside the hot water from her body.

Unaware, Nancy said, “I don’t know that our bodies always do what we want when we want them to. That’s why some of us have children we didn’t expect.” She said it cheerfully and several women laughed, but not the stout woman. Nancy added, “She may not be able to wait until last is all I’m saying.”

“I’m not about to expose my privates to no black slave woman parading as a wife. She don’t belong in this circle.”

“She’s not a slave, she’s my friend and—”

“I’s all right. You stay.” Letitia stepped farther back to a desert place without shadow.

“This is ridiculous.” Nancy moved back toward Letitia. “Oh.”

She
smell me.

“Please. It be easier. You go to circlin’.” Letitia motioned with her hands, then squatted, finished relieving herself, alone.

Nancy’s hands gripped her hips. She set her jaw, then accepting Letitia’s plea, stomped back beside her mother. The stout woman curled her lip in a sneer and turned her back to the circle’s interior, held out her skirt to offer protection to the first woman who stepped inside the circle of safety. A skinny woman leaned in to
Nancy and said something Letitia couldn’t hear, but Nancy nodded. Her shoulders dropped a little. When each woman had tended to her personal hygiene needs, “the fundamentals” Nancy called it, the stout woman broke from the ring and walked back to the camp without a backward glance. A few others joined her, looking back, shaking their heads. The women in Nancy’s family stayed, as did a few others who at Nancy’s insistence moved toward Letitia.

“I’s finished.”

Letitia dropped her bundled skirts that brushed the dirt. Hot tears pressed against her puffy cheeks. Nancy wrapped her arms around her and mercifully, said nothing, just held her. Through tears she heard two women agree to exchange a spice. A grandmother told a story about her littlest grandchild finding a frog. Nancy patted her back, released her, as Letitia wiped her eyes. “Anyone know how to keep a fever down?”
These be fundamentals
.
Tendin’
and mendin’ and befriendin’.

Walking back, Nancy took Letitia’s hand and said, “You should have let me argue on your behalf, Tish. People won’t change their ways if they aren’t confronted with their prejudices. They need their sensibilities confronted.”

“I knows my place. I jus’ forgets sometime ’cause you so kind. Don’t stand for me. It make trouble for you if you seen as befriendin’ such as me.”

“If they knew you, they’d soon see that your soul and your spirit are the same colors as theirs.” Nancy said it with a huff.

“People don’ change ’cause you ask ’em to. They change if they let the Lord make a safe place for ’em. They don’ feel safe with me . . . like I don’ feel safe with lots of them.”

They made their way through prairie grass and swollen streams lulled by the harness shakes of A, B, C, and D bearing their heavy yokes. Pale yellow clouds wisped into dusk as Letitia prepared a light meal. There’d be a wedding this evening. The pilot, Stephen
Meek, would take a young bride, already eighteen, whom he’d known for three days.

The night before, Letitia and little Laura had walked to the river and found turtle eggs they brought back to make the bride’s cake. The bride was a new orphan, her father having drowned days before. She had no one. Letitia baked the cake, the pleasant aroma pouring from the reflector oven.

After the vows were spoken before a Mississippi Baptist minister, everyone danced and laughed and told stories and ate. Letitia tapped her toes to the music but stayed well away from the partying. Her own wedding came to mind. Love didn’t always draw two people together. Sometimes it was security as she suspected it was for the new Mrs. Meek. But like a good garden patch, security was the soil that made love grow strong. Marriage, spoken over sacred words, was meant to last a lifetime and she hoped that would be the case with Davey and with the Meeks.

She watched Davey stand off with men laughing and talking. Once he looked up to where she stood in the darkness. She was out of campfire light so she knew he couldn’t see her well, but it pleased her just the same that he’d taken the time to seek her out. He gave a little wave, his white blouse sleeves ballooning in the evening breeze, the wide black belt showing his slender frame. She lifted her hand from her belly and waved back when Davey started across the dance boards loaned from someone’s wagon bottom. “Care for company?”

“I’s obliged.”

He slipped his arm around her plump waist. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Sometimes a body didn’t know what it needed until someone else made the offer. Marriages were made up of those small moments, she decided; she would learn to inhale them.

“We’re going to split into three groups now.” Davey talked while she cooked a rare turtle egg in the pan.

She wished they’d brought chickens along. Davey called her streaked meat “bacon.” It bubbled beside the egg.

“Meek is taking the group without cattle and they’ll go ahead. Joel Palmer will take the small-stock division—where we’ll be—and the rest will go in the large stock company. We’ll rotate being in front a week at a time. Maybe there’ll be less arguing that way about who travels in whose dust.” He adjusted the wide belt at his waist. “I think I’m slipping pounds, Tish. Get me another slice of that bacon. How you feeling?”

“I like slippin’ a few pounds.” She patted her stomach.

“All in due time. All in due time.”

That week they saw wolves trailing large buffalo herds raising mountains of dust in the distance. Debate about hunting them ensued, but the company voted to keep going. They encountered a group of trappers taking hides to St. Louis who offered to bring mail back to the states. The companies shut down early so letters could be written and sent off. They were also joined by a platoon of nineteen soldiers out of Fort Leavenworth pulling two wagons of howitzers along with their sidearms and rifles. “Sent for security and to be a show of force to the Indians, I ’spect,” Davey said.

They went to bed knowing the dragoons camped not far from them. Additional security. Letitia woke with a start. The tent floor felt wet. Had her water broken? No. The crack of thunder again. “Davey. We get up and sleep in the wagon. It rainin’ hard.”

The night lit up then, flashes of lightning split the wide sky horizontally, the boom and roll of thunder forcing her hands to her ears.

“I’ll pull the tent under the wagon out of the rain.”

In the flashes as she crawled under the wagon, she watched others scurrying from their tents or tying the canvas down and quieting the cries of children. Cattle bawled. Hail came then, as large as a baby’s thumb. One hit her leg and she winced. Rothwell pushed into the tent with them. Once assured that Letitia was covered, Davey moved off through the rain toward the cattle. The drovers
would need help. He yelped when the hail hit him as he ran toward the rope corral to find his horse, pulled his greased hat brim down tight against the storm.

Wind whipped up the tent side flaps, forcing water to gush onto the oiled pad. Being under the wagon was foolhardy. She was as wet as being outside. “You stay here, Roth.” She scrambled out as best she could and was drenched to the skin by the time she pulled her bulky body up into the wagon. Inside, she tugged the ropes tight at each end, shook her arms and fingers of the rain. Ran her hands over the cornrows, feeling their nubbins, then found a dry tow linen to slip over her head.

Inside, she stared out at the vast night through the O with its puckered opening. She’d never seen such a storm as this, wind whipping the whole wagon as though it might tip over, then rocking back on its wheels. Her skin quivered with a lightning flash. The sky was so vast and their little wagons as vulnerable as rabbits beneath a sky full of hawks. The hail split a hole in the canvas and she stood to pull it tight, to keep it from tearing further. She looked around for her needle but it would have to wait. She grabbed a wooden bucket and collected the rain beneath it. She wished that Davey would come back. She didn’t like weathering this storm by herself.

“Roth! Come!”

He only had to be called once. She pulled the strings to the O, letting the dog soar in. The two hovered together in the rain, shivering but neither alone.

In the morning Zach and Nancy looked out at the devastation. Wagons tipped on their sides, with blankets and barrels and children’s stuffed dolls, and a boy’s small boot spilled out into mud so thick that people grew two inches with it stuck to the bottom of their shoes. Broken wagon tongues and wheels meant a day or more of repairs. Dozens of horses and cows had been lost and a party formed to search for them. Zach left to check for wounded.
Nancy saw Letitia sewing patches on the hole in the canvas, her face warm from the drying sun. Clothing lay spread on the wagon seats to dry. Nancy had attached a clothesline to her wagon and hooked it onto her mother’s so they could lay out drenched quilts. Then she headed toward Letitia.