Читать книгу Tears of the Mountain - John Addiego - Страница 10

and a girl in a gingham dress hanging wash turned to see their wagon and smiled as they passed. They were a bedraggled lot, as Father had tried to get by without the outfitting of the average emigrant, scrimping and making do at every turn, and Jeremiah had been choking and wheezing for air in the cramped wagon beside his sister Ruth. From the opening in the Osnaburg covers coated with stinking gutta-percha against the rain he’d peered at the sunlit tree and felt his heart leap when the girl turned and smiled. He smiled back but shyly averted his gaze a second later.

They made camp among a hundred wagons in a muddy clearing called Big Soldier Rendezvous. There were many hundreds more head of cattle than men, and the sound of mooing and shouting and wood-chopping was everywhere. Jeremiah and Ruth, two years his senior, had been trying to fathom the dynamics between their parents since the old man had returned unannounced after a decade’s absence, and particularly during these three days as Mother and Father had sat in utter silence on the bench behind the team of oxen. “Perhaps God is giving them another chance,” Jeremiah whispered to her in the creaking wagon hold.

“Or perhaps they’re just a couple of cuckoos,” she whispered back.

There was talk of this being the last place to find firewood, yet there were so many fires going as to conjure the children of Israel making burnt offering to God before setting out for the unknown. Men stood on barrels and buckets and shouted to gathered clumps of men and women, and Jeremiah recognized a kind of rudimentary governance taking shape, arguments and voting and elections of wagon captains, oratorical listings of rules and punishments, advice about water and provenance. He listened as he wandered from clump to clump, looking for the girl with the pigtails. There were rhetorical flourishes calling upon the greatness of our founding leaders in their creation of a true democracy; there were biblical allusions to the push westward to a promised land ordained by the highest; and there were commonsense speeches by the drovers and cattlemen about taking care of the hooves of ox teams. At times it seemed to Jeremiah that it was less a wagon train than a cattle drive as he listened to the bovine moans and heard the boys on horses yell their commands to the horned beasts that surrounded their camp.

He had seen this many people only once before, in Saint Joseph before the jump, but here the crowd expressed a different sort of excitement than when engaged in the commerce of a municipality. They were off to new lives, every one of them, by God! And for Jeremiah the hopefulness and delight of this new beginning seemed to come less out of the crucible of these many fires than from the momentary glimpse of a girl with pigtails waving beneath a willow tree.

After the many speeches and the dinners and cleanup, as the night deepened and the stars flew among the bare branches with the fire sparks, a mournful melody floated among the pot-clanks and laughter, a rough-edged fiddle-sawing. Slow and sad, at first sour and grating as a toad call, soon it became sweet as it blended with a girl’s voice:

“Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind She’s always controlled, she’s always confined Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”

Jeremiah found the source: the girl with pigtails, singing with eyes closed beside the fiddler, who looked to be her father. Her voice was so haunting and beautiful that Jeremiah had to sit in the dirt and close his eyes to take in the rest:

“Oh, I’m just a poor girl, my fortune is sad, I’ve always been courted by the Wagoner’s lad He’s courted me daily, by night and by day, And now he is loading and going away.”

Directly the fiddle turned bright and quick and was echoed by the sound of hands clapping in unison and voices shouting. Jeremiah opened his eyes and saw a good many people dancing by firelight, ladies in their long work dresses and tight bonnets being turned about by bearded men in suspenders and baggy breeches, dogs barking excitedly, a few men lifting a jug and passing it down the line. Among the dancers was one clean-shaven fellow in a waistcoat and fancy collar who seemed to give the ladies the most wondrous turns as he moved up and down the line. He had high boots and tight pants, round cheeks and full lips, and blond curls that bounced across his forehead as he twirled the girls and ladies. Jeremiah looked upon him in awe, and his sister Ruth exclaimed that she’d never seen such a gentleman.

The word became flesh for the first time in his life: gentleman. Jeremiah had possibly never seen one until now, such a robust, well-turned, powerful, elegant, handsome figure of a man. He had a broad, intelligent face and an erect bearing. He moved with the grace of a stallion among clumsy oxen, taking the women in his arms one by one until, with the onset of a slow waltz tune, he bowed deeply and took the hand of the girl with the pigtails.

In a moment Jeremiah felt the hope of the new world come to an end. The girl smiled up at the beau and joined him in dance. The boy’s sinuses swelled and his lungs rattled. He turned away and bent double with coughing, making to slink back to the wagon and fall in a defeated heap, but a hand smacked him smartly across the back, nearly knocking him to his face in mud, while another kept him from striking the earth by gripping his back collar. “You all right?”

Ruth had been raised chopping wood and swinging a mattock into pine-root-infested soil, and her back-slap came with authority. She laid into him several times, but he was unable to yelp for her to stop. A good number of people laughed at her performance of filial affection, and one young wit remarked, “If that boy ain’t dyin’ already, she’ll make sure he gits to heaven fast,” which made Ruth stop.

“He’s got the agues,” she said in her defense.

Jeremiah felt the fellow’s strong hands help him to a seat on a wooden toolbox. The man had a new wisp of beard and a dirty shirt made of sacking. “You all right, boy?” Jeremiah nodded. “You think yer sister kin dance as well she kin beat people half to death?” He heard Ruth huff indignantly behind him as several people laughed. “You think if I ast her to waltz she’d toss me around the ring like I was a sack of flour?”

Jeremiah took an immediate liking to the fellow. “Mayhap,” he rasped.

Ruth was the one Mother called sassy, her obstinate mule-girl. Mary and Grace had found husbands and farms of their own, but Ruth had never seemed marriageable in Mother’s or Jeremiah’s eyes until that night’s waltz with the big-shouldered, wispy-bearded fellow. He watched them turn about stiffly by the firelight among the many couples, and he watched the willow girl spin in perfect grace with the handsome gentleman, and the beauty of their dancing warmed his bruised heart. The agony of being sickly and unfit, of being merely fourteen and pimply and small for his age into the bargain, was alleviated by this moment of pure observation. How lovely they looked in the firelight!

THE NEXT MORNING he sat cleaning the family flintlock, a Kentucky long rifle that had been his maternal grandfather’s, when David, the wispy-bearded fellow, asked him to join in a deer hunt before the wagons got ready to roll. He spoke to the boy, but his eyes searched the wagon.

“She’s gathering wood,” Jeremiah told him. David’s cheeks flushed.

They were joined by three other young men, including the handsome gentleman, and Jeremiah felt deep gratitude for being included, even though he knew his invitation was a product of merely having been present when David had come sparking for Ruth. The other three complained of headaches from drinking corn whiskey, and the handsome fellow, whose name was William, spoke of the finer spirits available in his homeland to the south. He had a sweet accent such as Jeremiah had never heard before, and round cherub cheeks, and golden curls that bounced on his forehead beneath the brim of his straw hat. The five of them tromped past the cattle and through a copse of small trees, the fellows bragging about spirits at first, then about the girls they’d danced with, then about girls from their hometowns. Jeremiah listened breathlessly as William was queried by a homely fellow in badger fur about the pretty lass with the pigtails.

“I will grant you that she’s a flower at the cusp of maidenhood. An Ohio girl with a proper education.”

“How far did you git last night?” Smith, the man in badger fur, asked. The others chuckled nervously.

“A gentleman doesn’t describe his affairs in detail,” William replied, and he gave Jeremiah a wink.

“My gut aches,” Badger-Fur Smith muttered. A moment later he unleashed a torrent of vomit against the trunk of a tree.

“Mary and Joseph, save me!” David leaped aside to avoid getting splashed.

“Whiskey,” Smith said between two blasts of regurgitation. “What the hell we got here?”

In the clearing before them stood three short men in animal hides. Their skin was dark, their hair tar black, their noses large, and their hands outstretched. “Them’s Kaw,” a young squat fellow named Stewart said. “I reckon they expect tribute fer us hunting their land, as the captain said they would.”

Smith wrinkled his features and spat close to the feet of the Indians, who approached, nonetheless, with hands out. “Hell you talkin’ ’bout? Tribute! By God!”

As the ugly man grumbled Jeremiah gazed in wonder at the dark-skinned strangers and didn’t think to step back with his fellows before one of the Indians had a hand in his breeches pocket and another on his flintlock.

“Hey,” he said, yanking back, “that’s my grandpap’s gun!” He heard the clicking of hammers behind him as the Kaw released the rifle stock but remained with outstretched hand.

“Put your piece down, Smith.” William came up beside Jeremiah with a beautiful pistol pointing at the man who’d ransacked the boy’s empty pocket. “They may not have any manners, but Stewart’s right about the custom.” With his other hand he tossed a plug of tobacco into the grass near the trio. “If we’re to consider this their land, we must expect to pay something.”

Smith growled through his matted whiskers, “I’d as soon kill ’em.”

“And start a durned war, you idiot?” David had stepped to Jeremiah’s other side. “Ain’t you heard a single one of the Oregon Emigration Society rules?”

The Kaw walked back into the trees with the tobacco plug. “I’d as soon shoot and skin ’em,” Smith grumbled.

THE WAGONS moved out behind the dust cloud of grazing cattle, single file and slow among the scrub oaks and pine flats. In draws and gullies and rises the old man had them disembark and push or pull the old converted hay wagon, and that first day outside Big Soldier he had Jeremiah and Ruth and himself simply walk beside the oxen the duration of that spring afternoon until they camped at sundown. Mother fretted over the boy’s catarrh, but after some time the wheezing became less frequent. Jeremiah had never walked much beyond the half mile to the river from their cabin; that afternoon the old man guessed they’d stamped a good five or six miles.

David called on Ruth during camp and tried to carry her firewood, but she knocked him aside with a hip. Not so hard as to discourage his attentions during supper, however, Jeremiah noted. William and several of the young men smoked pipes at another fire, and Jeremiah hovered near them a while, then wandered in search of the girl with the golden pigtails. Once again the fiddle was struck up after camp cleanup, and the couples danced in lines by firelight, his sister with the jokester David, William with the girl with the radiant smile framed by pigtails. Small children held hands and spun about near the adults; drunks slapped knees and hooted. Jeremiah rubbed his sore feet and legs and watched the others beat the ground with their boots until a gunshot echoed through the night sky.

The dance stopped, and voices shouted from the west. William embraced the girl, released her to the clutch of well-dressed children and adults who must have been her family, and took up the elegant pistol and rifle he’d set against a wagon wheel. Jeremiah followed him among several men, a few holding oil lanterns.

“They done stole two head of cattle,” a deep voice growled.

“And now you skeered half the herd off into the hills,” another voice shouted. Jeremiah and the others reached a pair of men standing near what looked to be a twisted log. A fellow with a cow hat cursed and hollered at the other, whose badger coat gave off a distinctive odor reminiscent of the morning’s hunt. “And you was supposed to skeer ’em. Not shoot ’em!”

Badger-Fur Smith held his rifle to his broad chest. “They’s thieves,” he said.

The cluster of men parted to make room for the arrival of a small fellow in black with a hatchet face and blazing eyes. Jeremiah knew him only as the captain and had heard him shouting orders from his saddle the day before. The group became quiet as the captain stepped past Smith and knelt in the grass beyond the circle of lamplight. The boy suddenly realized that the twisted log behind Smith was a human body. The captain lifted the man’s bare arm and let it drop.

The boy was seized by a sudden nausea, and he thought of Smith’s blasts of regurgitation that morning. The group remained silent as the captain knelt beside the corpse. Finally he stood and entered the lamp circle.

“You’re relieved of guard duty and fined one day’s provender,” he said to Smith.

“What the hell—” the man started, but the captain cut him off:

“Further insubordination and you’re cut off with my order to shoot you on sight if you follow the train.”

Smith’s squinty eyes exploded open. “Fer killin’ a goddamned thief Injun?”

The captain turned his narrow face from Smith and searched the gathering. “Where’s that old feller? McKinley?” Jeremiah was dumbstruck to see his father step forward into the light. “What you know about Kaw funerals?”

The gaunt old man pulled on his long whiskers before responding. He knelt beside the corpse near the captain. “They bury ’em,” he said at length. “Leave a pile of stones atop and some remembrance, I reckon. That ’ere necklace would do.” He touched the dead man’s neck, and another spasm went through Jeremiah’s innards. “I’ve seen them leave a little food in there, such as they’d have something to eat in the other world.”

“Smith,” the captain said, “you dig the hole and see to McKinley’s wishes.” The ugly man started to grumble, but the leader’s glare silenced him. “I need five men with horses to help round up the strays,” he said to the assemblage. William and David stepped forward. “Follow me.” Jeremiah made off in their direction, but his father called him back.

“Boy,” old Daniel said, “come give a hand.”

“I was going to help with the cattle.”

“You ain’t a need to those men. We sold the horses fer them ox.” In the periphery of the lamplight his father’s beard and glinting eyes were the only things visible about him. Smith stood with one boot on the corpse and arms crossed, cursing softly. “Git the pick and shovel.”

“I’m feeling sick.”

“Catch a breath, then bring the tools.”

Smith cursed loudly. “The hell I’m a’gonna bury no stinkin’ horse-thief savage!” He kicked the corpse. “Captain kin jest kiss my rosy red afore I bury this thing.”

“Leave me and the boy to do it,” the old man said. Smith stomped off. Jeremiah sucked in his breath. The injustice of the situation overwhelmed him. There was young, stinking Badger-Fur Smith, big and brawny and foul-mouthed, just ordered by the captain to dig a grave for the man he’d shot, getting out of the job; here was a sickly boy and an old man, whose first wife and kids had been murdered by Indians, left to do it in his stead.

“It’s not our job, Pap,” he said. “The captain ordered Smith to do it.”

“The captain can kneel and kiss my nethers,” Smith called over his shoulder as he lumbered off.

“Git the mattock and spade,” old Daniel said.

“I won’t,” the boy said.

THE NEXT MORNING the boy’s disobedience was never mentioned, but he felt its presence in his mother’s grimace and his sister’s smirk. For thousands of years, since the children of Israel had fled Egypt, the boy thought, rules forbidding such misbehavior had been clear and carried a severe penalty, but now, as they were heading toward a new world, they seemed open to some debate. What right did an old stranger, this man who had abandoned them all for a decade, have to give him orders, even if he was his father? He felt the conflict work its way across Mother’s features, she who had encouraged his free thinking, and prepared his defense should the subject arise, but it never did. The old man simply stared ahead as he led the team.

There was a sudden cloudburst as they trudged forward, such that the rain gathered and poured off the branches and the brims of his father’s and his own felt hats, and just as it stopped the trees disappeared. They walked in dripping silence beside the oxen, under a sky that grew huge and blue to the north and black with thunder-clouds to the south, and onto a dazzling, rolling green sea of grass such as the boy had never imagined.

There were fields near home between the river willows and the woods, which he had always loved, but here was the entire round earth turning under the endless heavens. Here was the very face of God shining before him! In all his readings of the Good Book, in all the stories of surrendered souls, he had never quite understood how small the will and acts of man were before those of God until now.

The wagon and cattle trains creaked and rattled and disappeared in the immensity. Simultaneous with this humbling first vision of the prairie came a sudden shame for disobeying his father, for the small and scheming vanity and willfulness that had caused him to abandon the old man to the work of burying the dead while he watched the young men mount horses and stood near the pretty girl with the pigtails as she waved them off. What trials and terrors had his father faced in his soul’s journey, the boy wondered as he watched the old man stride forward onto the ocean of

grass sparkling