A Man for Temperance (Wagon Wheel) (11 page)

“Not us,” one said nervously.

“Well, you better get him to a doctor. I don’t think I kilt him, but you never can tell. Come along, Miss Peabody.”

Shocked beyond measure, Temperance managed to climb into the wagon. She saw the children trembling, and finally they were all aboard. Brennan walked along beside Babe. He was singing a song she had never heard, and she was surprised at the good quality of his voice.

Rena was sitting beside her, and neither one of them spoke until they were outside the gates of Fort Boise. Rena turned and said, “Thad done good, didn’t he?”

“No.”

“Yes, he did. He bought me and Bent some clothes and some boots. The first time a drunk ever kept his word to us, and he gave you that pretty underwear too.”

Temperance’s face grew scarlet again. “I’ll never wear a thread of it.”

“I would if I was big enough,” Rena said. She was quiet for awhile, and then she turned to look at Brennan and said softly, “Maybe Brennan’s not as bad as I thought.”

“He’s terrible!” Temperance said.

Rena shook her head. “He ain’t as bad as some I’ve seen.”

FOR TEMPERANCE EACH DAY had become just like every other, like a series of severe illnesses. She’d had some vague but rather good memories of her trip from the East to Oregon Territory, but the harsh realities of the grinding struggles she faced now were an ever-present reality. Every day brought laborious work, unending fatigue, and bad weather. The constant care of the children added to all of this, and the antagonism of the two older Overmeyer children tested her patience to the limit. She had no idea how many miles they covered each day, but it seemed the trip had no end. The dry complainings of the wheels as the wagon lumbered over the broken earth ceased only when they stopped for the night. Whether they traveled five miles or twenty, it didn’t seem to matter, for the endless waste was always before them.

The oxen were suffering, too, and Temperance grieved over them. They were hard to keep together overnight and had to be hobbled, a task that required more of Brennan’s time and energy. Always the question of water loomed before them, and thirst was a never-ending torment. The country itself was ugly, at least to her, a land that seemed to have been left over from Creation, broken by yawning fractures and raw gullies. The mountains, some of them far ahead and others fading in the background, seemed to her more like walls of a great prison.
The great gorge that bordered the Snake River was cut so deeply that getting to it took every bit of strength and endurance a person could summon up.

Fatigue had dragged Temperance down, and she was dozing on the seat when suddenly the right front wheel of the wagon dropped off into a deep rut. The abrupt jolt caused the hard seat of the wagon to pound against Temperance almost with the force of a heavy blow. She was holding Gus in her lap, and with a yowl he jumped away from her and disappeared under the canvas.

“That’s a crazy cat,” Rena remarked. She was sitting beside Temperance on the wagon seat holding Billy, who seemingly could sleep through an earthquake. The jolting pace of the wagon never seemed to trouble him.

With a grimace, Temperance shifted on the hard seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Up ahead she saw Brennan sitting astride Babe, rocking with the motion of the ox.
Only
Thaddeus can ride an ox while he’s drunk!
She swallowed her irritation with the man, and nodded at Rena. “I’ve had him since he was a kitten. He was so tiny I had to feed him with an eyedropper.”

“I had a cat once. Her name was Queenie. She was black all over and had big green eyes. She used to sleep with me at night. But Ma made me get rid of her.”

“Why did she do that?”

Rena gave Temperance a look that reflected the hard core of her personality. “Because she was mean.”

“Your cat was mean?”

“No, Queenie was sweet. Ma was mean.”

Temperance had known that both Rena and Bent had an ingrained bitterness against their parents. She was well aware
of the effects of bitterness on an individual spirit, but this did not seem to be the time nor the place to reason with Rena. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. She almost suggested that her relatives would let her have a pet, but Rena had already spoken in adamantine tones about her uncle and aunt. Finally Temperance said, “Gus has been a lot of company to me.”

Rena said moodily, “Cats are funny. They don’t come and make over you like a dog does.”

“No, they’re pretty independent, but I love Gus. He’s been my companion.”

“I guess if you don’t have a man, a cat’s a pretty good thing to have.”

Instantly Temperance felt her face go warm. She glanced at Rena and saw that the girl was studying her in a curious fashion. The girl was a strange mixture of child and woman, and the remark could have been casual, but Temperance saw the slight glitter in Rena’s eyes and knew it was a gibe aimed at her unmarried state. It was the sort of hardness—even cruelty—that Temperance had seen in Rena, but beneath that harsh surface Temperance sometimes caught a hint of another person who cried out for some of the gentler things of life. She could not think of a proper answer to make.

Rena stared at Temperance for a long moment, then asked, “Have you tried on any of that fancy underwear that Brennan won at the poker game?”

“No!”

“Why not? They’re real soft. I bet they’d be comfortable.”

“They’re—they’re not for a woman like me.”

“They’re just underwear is all they are. Why, you always try to make things mean something.”

“They’re for a different kind of woman.”

“For a saloon woman, I reckon you mean. That’s who they were meant for, Brennan said.” Rena laughed suddenly. “I don’t see what difference it makes. If I was you, I’d wear ’em.” Rena waited for a response, and when she got none, she shifted Billy in her arms into a more comfortable position, then asked, “You ever had a man?”

The question seemed to be innocent enough, but still the color deepened on Temperance’s cheeks. She could not think of a way to answer the question, and Rena pressed on. “I bet you ain’t.”

“It’s not something I want to talk about, Rena.”

“You’re pretty old not to have a man. How old are you anyhow, Temperance?”

“I’m thirty-two.”

“That’s pretty old.”

Suddenly Temperance had to laugh. “I suppose it is to you. When you’re twelve, everybody over twenty seems ancient.”

“How come you never got a man?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It just never happened.”

Rena fell silent, for which Temperance was thankful, and as the wagon lumbered on, Temperance began to scan the horizon. Brennan had told them there was no problem with Indians in this stage in their journey, but she could not believe it. She felt unsafe, uncertain somehow, when he got out of sight and felt that this was a weakness she could not acknowledge.

“That was really something how Brennan knocked that feller down just with one lick, wasn’t it?”

“He’s a violent man.”

“Reckon he is,” Rena shrugged. “But I’m glad he’s with us. He sure took care of that feller, though, and them other two that was with him, they was scared green.”

“He’s not a good man, Rena, but he’s all I could get.”

Rena pondered Temperance’s reply and then said flatly, “He’s good enough to get us over this desert. That’s all I know.”

* * *

BRENNAN FOUND A SMALL spring late in the afternoon, and they made camp for the night. Their day had been longer than usual, and by the time Temperance washed the diapers and made a meal of sorts, the darkness seemed to be complete. The children were all asleep now, and Brennan disappeared without a word. He had that way about him, of simply walking off without a word of good-bye, exactly as he would return without a word of greeting. His manners were terrible—almost as bad as his appearance, in Temperance’s judgment, and as she sat on an upturned box beside the fire, she felt a loneliness of the land. They had passed two wagon trains headed westward, but Brennan had steered clear of them.

Looking up at the black canopy of the sky, she was momentarily pleased by the stars that seemed to flash like diamonds. She wished she knew the names of them, but one of only the few she knew was Venus. She remembered once when she was very young, her mother had pointed that one out to her, saying, “That’s the morning star.” She also knew Polaris, the North Star, and the Big Dipper. As she sat there she thought about sailors to whom the skies were a map they could follow across the trackless waste of the ocean.

From far off came the sound of a wolf’s plaintive cry, a mournful incantation that seemed to increase the loneliness. Brennan had told her that wolves were usually as shy as coyotes and would never attack them, but she wasn’t sure.

The days had exhausted her, and she reached down and rubbed Gus’s head. “It’s been a hard day, hasn’t it, Gus? I bet you’ll be glad to get to the other end of the trip. I know I will be.” She heard nothing but suddenly a shadow separated itself from the darkness of the night, and Brennan came in carrying his rifle loosely in the crook of his arm. He had not shaved in several days and made a rough figure as he leaned the rifle against the wagon, then moved to the fire. “Anything left to eat?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ll get it for you.” Temperance pulled a meal together—antelope steak again and two baked potatoes with three biscuits grown hard. “I’ll make biscuits tomorrow or the next time we stop early,” she said.

He took the plate, sat down, and ate hungrily. As he washed the meal down with swallows of black coffee, Temperance studied him. He was a man roughly put together, like a machine made to perform hard labor. The flickering firelight cast shadows on his face, and she noted that his heavy nose swelled somewhat at the base to accommodate wide nostrils. His hair was black and coarse, almost like an Indian’s, and his eyes were deep-set, a smoky gray with just the faintest suggestion of blue, a color she had never seen before in a man or woman. He was, she knew, a trifle over six feet tall, long of arms. She noted, not for the first time, a scar shaped like a fish hook at the left corner of his mouth and she wondered what sort of violence had put it there. The edge of his jaw was sharp against the heavily tanned skin, and he sat there apparently unconscious of her presence. “We ought to be in Fort Hall tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

The words broke the silence of the night, punctuated only by the cracking and popping of the fire, and a log shifted, sending a swarm of red and orange sparks swirling upward. Leaning
over, Temperance put a large chunk of green wood on the fire, then asked, “What’s it like?”

“Fort Hall? A little bit better than Fort Boise. We need to get a few more supplies. Some more trading goods for the Indians.”

Curiosity about the man’s background came to Temperance then. She had put her life in this man’s hands, yet she knew nothing about his past. It was almost as if he had been created the day she met him, and it struck her afresh how she was willing to put her life and the lives of the children in the hands of a man about whom she knew nothing.

“Where did you grow up, Thaddeus?”

Her question caught the tall man by surprise. He sipped the coffee and shrugged his shoulders. “Tennessee.”

The answer told her nothing except that he was a Southerner, which she already knew from the cadences of his speech. “What about your family?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Women usually are.” He, for a moment, appeared to ignore her question and was silent. “My pa died when I was two. There was five of us kids. All I can remember is working on that rocky, mountain farm. Get up before daylight, work until dark, go home, eat a piece of cold cornbread, and go to sleep. Get up and do it the next day all over again.”

“It sounds like a hard life.”

“I don’t like to think about it much. My ma had a hard time.” He let the silence run on and finally picked up a stick and stuck it into the tiny, orange flame. He waited until it caught and then lifted it out and stared at it as if there were some sort of wisdom in the tiny tear-shaped flame that consumed the
stick. “We were always hungry. Never had any clothes except what Ma could make or someone gave us. I had two brothers. I was the youngest of the three boys. My oldest brother was Mack. Next in line was Sims.”

“What were they like?”

“Worked to death like me.” He tossed the twig back into the flame and watched the fire turn it into a burning ember, then his voice took on a strange timbre. “When Mack was sixteen and we got back from plowing, Ma had Mack’s things ready in a bundle. She gave them to him, and he stood there looking at them. She gave him a dollar then and said, ‘I can’t afford to keep you no more, Son. You have to make your own way.’”

Temperance could not understand such things. “And what happened to him?”

“He left and we never saw him again. The thing I remember is he started to go, and Ma ran to him and hugged him and kissed him, then he left.”

“What a terrible thing!”

“Terrible times. Same thing happened to Sims a year later. Ma had his things wrapped up in a bundle. She gave him a dollar and kissed him and told him she couldn’t afford to keep him.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“No. We heard he got killed in a sawmill accident in Louisiana. Of course, we never knew for sure.”

Temperance said, “I feel sorry for your mother. That was just you who helped with the two girls?”

“Not for long. It wasn’t but a few months after Sims left that I came in from plowing and Ma had my things together. I knew what she was going to say.” He looked up at the stars, and then his gaze came to her. There was a harshness about him, and he
said, “She just gave me the bundle and didn’t say a word, but I knew what it meant. I waited for her to give me a dollar and to kiss me, but she never did. I said good-bye to the girls and I left.” He fell silent then, and finally in a voice so soft she barely heard it he said, “I could understand why she couldn’t keep me, and I know she didn’t have a dollar. But I never could figure out why she never kissed me like she did Mack and Sims.” He suddenly turned and looked at Temperance and saw tears standing in her eyes. Gruffly he said, “Nothing to cry about. They were tough times.”

Temperance dashed the tears from her eyes. Suddenly she felt that she knew the strange man in a way she hadn’t before. She wanted to reach out somehow to him and let him know how his story had affected her, but there was no chance. Without another word he got up, walked over to the blankets he kept beyond the edge of the fire, rolled up, and was still.