Where the Lost Wander(23)
Daniel’s death has taught me that death is fickle and final, and it doesn’t spare anyone. It doesn’t spare us. Abigail starts the day walking beside the wagon with Ma, but by lunch she is doubled over with terrible cramps, and her bowels are so loose she removes her bloomers so she will not soil them. She insists it’s the baby she’s carrying, but she is so ill by nightfall she does not respond when we try to make her drink. Warren holds her hand and begs her not to go, but she does not wake again, and my brother becomes a surviving spouse, just like me.
We make a coffin out of the extra box seat, burying her in a shallow ravine beside a single line of trees not far from the Little Blue. John Lowry helps Pa and Wyatt dig the hole, and we mark the spot with a cross fashioned from the slats of Ma’s rocking chair. After the endless bump and sway of travel, none of us may ever want to rock again.
Ma sings a song—To the land I am bound, where there’s no more storms arising—and the Methodist deacon in the train, a man named Elias Clarke, says a few words about God’s eternal rest. But there is no rest. We are moving again as soon as the crude coffin is in the ground.
“She didn’t even want to come. She wanted to stay in Illinois close to her ma,” Warren cries. “I didn’t think there was anything for us in Illinois. I didn’t listen. Now she’s gone. Now I have to leave her in the middle of nowhere, all alone.”
We can’t console him, and by nightfall he is so ill with the same thing that brought Abigail low we fear he will follow in her footsteps. Wyatt drives his oxen, and Warren lies in the back of his wagon, inconsolable, racked by pain in his limbs and his bowels, mourning a wife who was darning the hole in his socks only yesterday. I ride with him, trying to ease his pain with remedies that don’t seem to help at all. Ma wants to tend to him, but I won’t let her. She is weak, and if Ma gets sick, Wolfe will die too. We may all die if Ma dies.
Pa asks us if we want to turn back. We are barely two weeks out of St. Joe, and life is no longer recognizable. We are walking sideways in an upside-down world. The talk of land and possibility in Oregon and California has been silenced by glum reality. Pa says we can follow John Lowry when he returns to Missouri and pay him to help us get back home. My heart leaps at that, but Ma just looks at me in that knowing way and shakes her head, though she addresses us all.
“There is nothing behind us, William,” Ma says. “We have nothing to go back to. If we turn around . . . Abigail will still be gone. Our future is out there. Our sons are going to make it to California. They are going to have a better life than the one we left. You’ll see.”
Somehow Warren holds on, but it takes us eight days to travel from the banks of the Big Blue River to the Platte. The wagon train is slowed by the death that dogs our heels, and Fort Kearny, sitting south of the shallow stretch of river, has no walls or fortifications. It’s an unimpressive, dusty encampment with corrals and barracks and cannons to keep the Indians away, though not too far away. A few lodges dot the landscape beside the main building, and I overhear talk of a Pawnee village within riding distance. The night we arrive, a group of Pawnee women, children, and old men stagger into the camp, crying and wailing. Someone says a band of Sioux attacked the village, took their animals, and burned some of the lodges. We saw the same thing along the Missouri River when we traveled from Council Bluffs to St. Joe. A band of Omaha Indians had been run from their village. Pa gave them what he could, and they continued on, mourning and moaning as though the Sioux were still behind them. I was relieved to reach St. Joseph, but the images of the bedraggled and bloody Omaha remained fixed in my memory. I sketched some of their faces in my book, trying to shake them loose. It brought them to life again, and I wished I had simply let the images fade. I’d captured anguish on paper and had no idea what to do with it.
The wind blows like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard. We circle the wagons, stake the wheels, and put the animals inside so they don’t scatter in the gale, and the circle seems to give the wagons a bit of protection, but I expect to be swept up at any moment. The boys are beneath the wagon, and Mama, Wolfie, and I are inside. I can’t hear Ma moaning in her sleep when the wind howls like this, and for that I’m grateful. She isn’t doing well. She talks in her sleep, and she’s pale and weak. I am worried she will get the dreaded cholera, but she just smiles and tells me not to worry.
“I never get sick; you know that, Naomi,” she says. And I realize I have learned all my bravado from her.
Ma moans and baby Wolfe wails, and it is hours before the winds calm and they settle, but I don’t sleep. Just before dawn, I pull on my boots and climb from the wagon. I can’t wait a moment longer to relieve myself, wind or no wind, and I don’t want to wake Ma to come with me. The stillness is eerie, the camp deep in relieved slumber, and I listen for the rattle of Pa’s snore, a sound to orient me in the dark. I don’t go as far as I’d like, but habit and the need for privacy force me farther than is probably prudent. I bunch my skirts and sling them over my shoulder, crouching so I won’t wet my shoes or my drawers, and empty my bladder into the prairie dirt.
The wind has blown away the clouds, revealing inky darkness prickled with stars, and I don’t want to return to the wagon. I’m tired, and the weariness will find my limbs and weight my lids when the day drags on, but the solitude invigorates me. I loosen my hair and comb it with my fingers before rebraiding it and washing in the water Pa brought up from the river last night. I try not to think about the wide brown expanse of the Platte. The spring rains have flooded the banks, pulling debris into the current. The water tastes terrible, but boiled and flavored with coffee, it’s bearable. Abbott says to sprinkle oats in a bucket of water and let them sink to the bottom, taking the silt with them. It works, but it wastes too. I comfort myself with the knowledge that it doesn’t seem to be the dirt that makes us sick.