A Light in the Wilderness (15 page)

“Quite a tirade last night.” Nancy carried her youngest on her hip, bouncing the child while Laura clambered inside the Carsons’ wagon. “Careful,” Nancy warned her daughter. “Martha, go with her and get her back. Her feet are muddy as the Platte and don’t need to be crawling over Mrs. Carson’s things.”

“It hard to believe the storm bring such trouble and then be all sunshine and warm right after.”

“Guess that’s what we’re supposed to remember about hard times.” Nancy swatted at a bug near the baby’s face. “They’re always followed by the warming sun.”

“At least this baby stay put.” Letitia’s voice caught.

Nancy reached across and patted her hand. “You call on me. Send Rothwell if you’re alone. That Davey busies himself.” The dog’s tail began to wag at the sound of his name. “Our wagons will never be that far from yours.”

She’d make sure Zach knew that they should be close to the Carsons. That Davey looked after the cows all right, but goodness, he wasn’t always aware of what his wife needed.

Nancy lifted her face to the sky and inhaled. “Air is fresh too. Good day to wash off the mud. Laura, get down.”

Letitia reached for four-year-old Laura from the back of the wagon.

“Oh don’t you lift her,” Nancy warned.

“I’m too big to carry.” Laura jumped through Letitia’s hands and landed with a splat in the mud. Laura didn’t even cry. She slapped the mud with her hands, tossing up black blots like freckles onto her face.

“Mama,” Martha complained as she stepped back from the splatter.

Nancy shook her head as she pulled Laura up and swatted her behind, then she sent her and Martha off on a task. “Time to fill the buckets, you two. See who can bring back the most water. Martha, you look after that scamp. And maybe find a little dry wood for us.”

“Slim chance they find anythin’ dry.” Letitia shaded her eyes of the sun. “You think it safe to let them fill buckets from the river with the rains? It so swift.”

Nancy looked. “They’ll be all right.” She turned back. “We’ve made a game of the bucket-filling. You feeling all right? You look a bit peaked.”

“I’s not feelin’ tops.” Letitia sank against the wagon wheel. Both the Hawkinses’ and the Carsons’ sturdy Bethel wagons hadn’t been tipped over nor had anything broken. Only the tears in the canvas and soaked bedding testified to the deluge. Letitia put her hands to her cheeks. “Jus’ hot. And wishin’ this baby would arrive. Overdue by my figurin’.”

“It’s a girl then.” Nancy spoke with certainty. “We women are always late.”

Letitia’s laughter was interrupted by a child’s cry of “Mama!”

Nancy turned toward the river.
Is that Laura
screaming?
Nancy hesitated then started to run.

“Give me Nancy Jane.”

Nancy nearly threw her infant at her friend while she picked up her skirts, rushing.

“Martha? Laura!”

Martha spurted out through the willows, sobbing.

“Where’s Laura? Where’s your sister? What’s wrong?”

Martha’s eyes were washed with fear.

Nancy looked beyond. “Where’s Laura?” She brushed past her daughter. “Laura! Where are you? Laura?” There hadn’t been enough time for her to get into trouble, had there?

Martha followed her mother through the willows and stood sobbing as Nancy rushed up and down the riverbank, calling out, skirts in her hands. One empty bucket lay at the riverbank. Nancy
felt more than saw her mother. Her mother-in-law. Letitia. Her sister.
The
river is high and swift.

“Martha.” Nancy turned, grabbed Martha’s shoulders. “Where is your sister?”

Martha pointed to the river, her sorrow broken with hiccups of pain. “She were there. And then she weren’t. I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry.”

And so am I.

A pall like a black lamp shade in an already darkened room fell over the camp. Letitia heard that a child lay ill with typhoid and another had been run over by a wagon but had been saved by the soft mud sinking him beneath the wheels. Heavy rains take one child; another is saved by the same downpour. Doc Hawkins had set the two broken bones. Letitia heard the hacking of a child with whooping cough. Laura was gone. Not a trace of her.

When the men returned, they too rode the riverbank seeking some sign.

Meek, the guide, said, “By eternal Moses, that thar river is full of swifty currents enough to swirl a grown man beneath them and hold him thar for weeks afore spitting him up.”

Nancy’s family surrounded her in her grief, but she sat dazed, seeming unaware that an infant patted her tear-stained cheeks. Laura was a child of the river now. Memories like wisps of sunset were all that remained.

Letitia offered to milk the Hawkinses’ cow. It was what she could think to do to help. Zach nodded his thanks, his eyes red and pinched.

Nancy repeated, over and over, “I sent her to her death. I sent her to her death.”

“No you did not.” Doc pulled her to his chest as they sat on the quilt in the wagon shade. He patted her back as she sobbed. “These things . . . we don’t control life or death.” He cleared his throat, nodded to Letitia.

“But I told them to go to the river. Letitia even asked if I thought it was safe. I should have known it was dangerous. I was so . . . cavalier about it. I killed her!”

“It was a terrible accident, Nancy. I could say I should have been here helping, so it’s my fault. Or we never should have left Missouri. That’s my fault too. Poor Martha’s blaming herself. There’s no place to mark blame or go back on this map. Here is where we are.”

Letitia touched her friend’s shoulder and squeezed. She picked up the Hawkinses’ milk bucket and stool. She waited a moment, trying to find something to say. What had anyone said to her that brought comfort when Nathan barely breathed a day?

“‘They is a time to weep and time to laugh; time to mourn and time to dance.’ I trust that promise, livin’ it. Things go better when weepin’ and mournin’ pass. I pray you is goin’ laugh and dance again. I walk beside you ’til you do, Miss Nancy. You not grieve alone.”

Nancy took Letitia’s hand. “You’ve lost a child. I’d forgotten. I’m so sorry. Your boy sold . . .” She turned back to her husband. “There’s no . . . body. Nothing to bury.” And she wept again.

For Jeremiah, sold away, there’d been no body either. A living death is what Letitia mourned; Nancy too, and those were hardest.

Doc whispered something about sorrow. Nancy nodded, wiped her nose still buried in his chest. Letitia could see the love Doc held for his wife, delaying his own grief while he worked to untangle hers.

Later that evening the company held a memorial for Laura Hawkins. Doc took one of the quilt frame sides and cut it, transformed it to a wooden cross, and carved Laura’s name on it. They pounded it into the soft ground not far from the river. The great sadness brought back Letitia’s old feelings of wondering if she ever should have left Kentucky. Maybe her son hadn’t died, was waiting for her to find him? She spoke a healing prayer for the Hawkins family. What had Doc said, that there was no map to go back.

The companies started wearing cantankerousness like a yoke around their necks. Davey tore at a piece of tobacco. It was worse than the town meetings squabbling over neighbors’ dogs or loose cattle in the commons. Company members complained about who got to follow whom, about whether to form two lines and let the children and women walk between them or form one long line. Either way, what to do about the dust—as if anything could be done about dust. The first time they’d actually been threatened by what someone thought was an Indian attack, chaos reigned like men riding unbroken horses in the middle of a mercantile. Women and children screamed and men ran around without ammunition close by, kids hid under the wagons as though they’d find safety there. No one seemed to be in charge or everyone was. They’d lived through that and there hadn’t even been an Indian in sight. Just a voice of panic from someone seeing things that weren’t there.

“There’s so little grass now,” Davey told Letitia, “the cattle are roaming farther and farther through the night and it’s taking us half the morning or more to round ’em up.”

Letitia scraped the tin plates of breakfast scraps for Rothwell.

“We have to have more than a few hours in the afternoon to travel or we won’t get to Oregon ’til Christmas. Now what’s that?”

He stood to the sound of a braying donkey.

“Lookee there. A little donkey’s got buffalo tails high to the wind heading west! Tish, they’re making better time than we ever
will.” Davey laughed despite his annoyance. “That little donkey has guts.” He sighed, poured himself another cup of grain coffee.

Letitia grinned watching the donkey’s antics, the big-headed buffalo running like frantic chickens.

“Lookee. We need to move ahead with the first company, Tish. We could be on the trail right now instead of sitting here while the guards round up the cattle. There was a group far behind us that’s moved up. We best do that too.”

“Don’ people count on each other? Aren’t you standin’ guard in, what you say, rotation?”

“We’ll find new people.”

Tish was quiet. He knew she was thinking because she sucked on her bottom lip when a thought worked its way to her tongue.

“We’ll be fine. We don’t want to get caught in the mountains at an early storm, so we got to go faster.”

“I needs to stay with the Hawkinses.”

Was this woman suddenly going to get demanding? “They’ve got two wagons and their cattle and kin. They can’t move much faster. We can.”

“We know them. They friends. They needs us.”

She chewed that lip again and absently rubbed her belly.
Maybe she needs them.
He couldn’t be giving in to every woman whim. Still . . . he didn’t want her troubled with this baby coming. She was good help and, besides, he liked her and maybe even loved her. He knew he liked her best when she wasn’t soured on something he’d done. He decided never to tell her that he’d been left off guard duty from now on because he’d fallen asleep. He was lucky he didn’t get lashed.

“Alright. We’ll wait until the baby comes. Then we move forward.” He supposed women did need each other at troubling times, unlike men who could go it alone.

The fiddler played “Turkey in the Straw” on a cooling-off evening on the first days of June. There’d been a wedding earlier in
the day with dancing and jerked buffalo meat to eat. Letitia and Nancy and her relatives had hung the strips on the poles the men set over a fire pit, smoking the meat in five hours or so. The men had come upon a buffalo herd and decided it was time to harvest a few. That’s what Davey called it, a harvest. Letitia boiled meat strips in a heavy salt brine, her mouth watering in anticipation. This meat would keep them for months, but the work had tired all of them. Some women didn’t even know how to cure it, nor separate the hide from the muscle.

Nancy’s family had worked beside Letitia, and even Nancy smiled once when Nancy Jane put her pudgy palm into the salt box then licked at the grains. The face she made looked like a punched-in peach. Letitia noticed that Nancy kept Maryanne close by and Martha even closer. Forgiving herself would take even longer than discovering there was no way to move her heart around to fill the empty space that Laura left.

It wouldn’t be long before the wagons reached Fort Laramie where they could resupply flour and corn and get iron for major repairs. Letitia planned to get new salve for the oxen and Charity’s hooves, split by the hard, dry ground. When the short bristled grass pushed up between the cracks, the hooves festered though Letitia washed them every night hoping to keep the faithful beasts from going lame. She struggled to bend and lift the heavy hooves, sat to do the washing. Fortunately, the animals were docile, but she still used caution lifting their legs. One jerk and her baby’s . . . well, she wouldn’t think about it.

Walking to Nancy’s wagon for her evening pause, Letitia caught an image of herself in the broken mirror Nancy’d hung on the side of her wagon. Letitia’s face had grown darker in the hot sun despite wearing the bonnet. And her cheeks looked plump as a gopher’s. When would this baby arrive?

“It feel good to have a full larder.” She nodded at the dried buffalo meat.

Nancy sighed. “At least I can keep the children fed if not safe.”

Letitia didn’t respond, ran her fingers through the daisy fuzz on Nancy Jane’s head. After a bit, she said, “I not sure we keep our chillun safe, not forever. We jus’ asked to prepare ’em for the dangers.”

“I didn’t do that well.”

“I hear you tell your girls be careful. But chilluns . . .” She raised her palms. “No holdin’ chilluns back from explorin’. It their nature.”

“Will it ever stop hurting?” Nancy looked at Letitia, wearing an ache so cutting, Letitia’s thoughts sank to a deepening well.

“Wounds heal, even ones made with sharp knives. But they be leavin’ scars.”

“Especially on the heart. My sister-in-law tells me I need to stop talking about it. ‘You’re not the first woman to lose a child,’ she says.”

“Grievin’ a personal thing. Can’t move on till you witness to the loss and that be different for each of us.”

“I pray, I do.”

“He listen. Maybe he send me to listen too.”

Nancy looked up. “Thank you for not telling me to be silent.”

“A grievin’ cloak wears different on ever’ body. When you ready, you put on a different one. ’Til then, I be here holdin’ your grievin’ shawl.”

“You and Zach. He never tells me not to talk about Laura or the emptiness.”

“He lovin’ you into healin’.” Nancy nodded and the two sat together with the fiddle playing in the distance.

Letitia hadn’t had anyone to help her being loved to healing, but she somehow knew how to do it for another. She guessed that was the Lord’s provision.

Walking back, Letitia felt her water break. “This good as any evenin’ for you to arrive.” She turned back to get her friend.

They named the girl Martha. Davey said it was his mother’s name, and Letitia liked giving Martha Hawkins a namesake, something to remind the child that life went on.