Where the Lost Wander(42)
“Her hair was heavy . . . like a great rope. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me because I was small. I would stand behind her and put my hands in it, like it was the mane of a pony, and I would pretend to ride. Sometimes she would carry me on her back, but most of the time she would sit, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, her body bowed forward so I could lean into her and hold on to her hair. More than once she fell asleep that way, nodding away as I pretended to ride. Then I would climb into the nest of her lap and go to sleep too.”
When I give him a picture of a nodding Indian girl, a little boy at her back with his hands in her hair, a suggestion of a horse transposed over the top of them, he doesn’t say anything, but he swallows, his throat working up and down. He rolls it into a scroll and wraps it with the others I’ve given him in a piece of cloth soaked in linseed oil and dried to make it resistant to water, and when he looks up to find me watching, he gives me one of his mother’s crooked smiles.
JOHN
Five hundred miles from where we began, the formations begin to rise up out of the earth, gnarled and notched like ancient parapets washed in a layer of sand and time, abandoned castles that have become part of the landscape. We reach the Ancient Bluffs first, and a group of us scrambles up one of the cliffs after we’ve made camp. Webb manages to disturb a nest of rattlesnakes concealed in a cleft and comes running, his bare feet hardly touching the ground. I kill a few, skin them, and give Webb their rattles, warning him to keep them away from the animals. Naomi fries the rattlesnakes with a little oil and onions. The May boys all swear it’s the best thing they’ve ever eaten, though I think they’re only trying to be brave. We haven’t had any fresh meat, though every now and then someone puts up a shout of an elk sighting and there’s a great stampede out onto the prairie in pursuit.
We still haven’t seen a single buffalo, though we’ve been told tales of herds so deep and wide that they cover miles at a time and flatten everything in their path. We haven’t seen the buffalo, and we haven’t seen any Indians, not since Fort Kearny. Wyatt says he never wants to see an Indian again unless it’s Charlie, who is talked about in hushed tones of reverence. Webb even thanks the Lord for him when the Mays pray at suppertime. Webb regularly gives thanks for me too, but I’m not sure if he does that just to make me feel welcome when I consent to eat with the family, which isn’t all that often.
On the opposite side of the Platte, we can see Courthouse Rock, which recalls gladiators and Roman soldiers in a world completely removed from my own. I will have to tell Jennie when I write another letter. She read me Julius Caesar, and I was struck by the duplicity of the senate and the disloyalty among friends, all for power. Jennie just raised her eyes from the book and warned me quietly, “Always watch your back, John Lowry. People haven’t changed all that much since then. Almost two thousand years, and our hearts are the same.” She turned to Proverbs then and read a scripture, a version of which she made me and my sisters memorize. “These are the things the Lord hates. A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans. Feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among brethren.”
We pass Chimney Rock the next day, its stovepipe handle shooting up into a cloudless sky, and Scott’s Bluff the next, all named by intrepid trappers and explorers who lived to tell about their adventures and make maps for treasure hunters and westward pioneers. One after the other, we trundle past monuments to the distance we’ve traveled and markers of the miles we have yet to go. I find myself wondering what their other names might be. What do the Sioux and the Pawnee call the landmarks? At the Ancient Bluffs, among the names carved by emigrants, we find figures engraved on the rock as well, figures no white man made.
Naomi has little interest in documenting things as they are. Instead, she draws a towering Chimney Rock with Webb perched on the steeple, Jail Rock with Lawrence Caldwell imprisoned inside—it makes me laugh in spite of myself—and Courthouse Rock, the size of a toadstool, being held in the palm of her mother’s hand. I tell her the landscape is making her see things, fanciful things, like a young Indian brave on a vision quest, in search of his destiny.
She seems fascinated by the notion and asks me if I believe in such things. When I don’t answer, she tells me about her mother’s dreams. She tells me her mother has seen me walking on the water in a feathered headdress, and I put my hand over her lips and shake my head. She falls silent immediately, her mouth warm against my hand.
“Don’t imagine I am something I’m not, Naomi.”
She nods and I release her, her eyes questioning. It is the only time I have intentionally touched her since she slept at my side when I was sick. The moments we steal when the camp has settled, when she comes to find me, her brother in her arms, are like her pictures. Naomi is a romantic. A dreamer. She sees what others don’t, but what she sees, what she draws, is not reality, and our times together have the same otherworldly cast.
I avoid her for several days, jarred by her retelling of her mother’s dream. I was raised on the Bible. I know who Jesus is. I don’t like the comparison. I also don’t like the bird that becomes a man in a headdress. A chief, walking on water. I don’t know what it means, and I don’t think what it means matters all that much, but it makes me feel like an oddity, something to be examined and exhumed. And that is not what I want to be. Especially not to Naomi.