by Harmon, Amy
“You don’t know where Naomi is now, do you?” Mrs. May asks.
“No, ma’am. It was nigh on an hour ago.” The crush of people is almost stifling, and the disquietude from the conversation with my father becomes fear for the missing Naomi. “But when you find her . . . you should tell her not to go off on her own. St. Joseph is full of rough men and strangers.”
“She’s probably buyin’ paper, Ma. Paper and pencils,” the oldest boy chimes in.
“There’s a general store beside the post where one can buy such things,” I say.
“Rough men and strangers,” Mrs. May repeats, and her eyes rove the crowds. “We feel fortunate to have you traveling with the company, Mr. Lowry. Someone so experienced on the trail will be greatly appreciated.”
“I’m only going as far as Fort Kearny, ma’am.”
She studies me soberly for a moment. “I think you’ll find that’s not far enough, Mr. Lowry.”
It is an odd thing to say, especially considering how difficult those first two hundred miles are on most families. Wet, windy, endless. I feel bad for the woman, for what she is about to endure.
“Pa says it’s two thousand miles to California,” Wyatt, says, somber.
I nod. The family stares at me, chins tipped up, eyes wide, waiting for me to say more. They are a strange bunch. I amend the word immediately. Not strange. Frank. Forthright. They don’t lower their eyes or shift away like they aren’t certain whether they want to be seen with me.
“We meet again, Mr. Lowry,” a cheerful voice calls out. Naomi May, a brown paper parcel in her arms, skips over the rutted street, sidestepping man and beast as she approaches. I look away when she stops at my side as though we are old friends. She doesn’t loop her hand through my arm or brush against me as some women do, wearing innocence on their faces and conniving in their hearts.
“Miss May,” I say, suddenly winded.
“Her name is Mrs. Caldwell, Mr. Lowry,” Webb informs me. “But we just call her Naomi.”
I ignore the sinking sensation in my belly and step back, my gaze swinging back to the elder Mrs. May.
“When do you cross?” I ask, keeping my gaze on the older woman.
“The line is so long . . . but I think Mr. May has secured us a ride across on a scow.” The groove between Mrs. May’s eyes deepens.
“I saw a boat capsize yesterday, Mr. Lowry! The wagon and the people all went into the water,” Webb crows like he enjoyed the show.
“Don’t try to cross on the scows. If you don’t have anyone who knows the river, don’t swim your animals across. Go to Decker’s Ferry. It’s a bit of a battle to get to it through the trees, but there’ll be a pasture and a place for you on the other side to wait until your company has arrived—Whitehead’s Trading Post too, in case there are things you need once you’ve crossed,” I say.
“I’ll tell my husband. Thank you, Mr. Lowry.”
“Will you be crossing on Decker’s Ferry as well, Mr. Lowry?” Naomi chimes in.
“I’ll swim my mules across here. But I’ll be at Whitehead’s Trading Post on the other side tomorrow to assist Mr. Abbott where I can.” I still do not look at her, and I take a few steps back, not wanting to tarry any longer. I am unsettled, and she is unsettling.
“Then we will see you there, Mr. Lowry,” Mrs. May says, inclining her head, and I tip my hat in return. They all watch me go.
Jennie is dozing in front of the broad window, the rays of the setting sun softened by the fluttering white curtains she keeps drawn across the wide panes. Her Bible is in her lap, open, and her palms rest on the pages as if she is not napping but receiving revelation, communing with the written word. The bright light blurs the fine lines on her skin, and for a moment she looks younger than her forty-five years. My father is fifteen years older than she is, but it’s easy to forget the age difference when I’ve never known them independent of one another. She hears me, and her eyes snap open. Closing her Bible, she rises and sets it aside.
“John Lowry,” she says, greeting me.
“Jennie.” I’ve removed my hat as I’ve been taught, and her eyes move to my uncovered head.
“Your hair needs trimming,” she says, as though she’s just noticing and didn’t send my father after me. “I’ll get my shears.”
“I’m leaving tonight,” I blurt, a warning that I’ll not linger long.
“What?”
“I’m going to swim the animals across tonight. I’ll make camp on the other side. If I swim them across in the morning, I’ll waste daylight getting dry.” I have not planned any of this, but the words spill out smoothly, as though I have thought it all through.
“You’re leaving tonight? But your sisters will want to say goodbye.”
“I’ll be gone for four weeks—five at the most. I don’t need to say goodbye.” The last thing I want is a big send-off.
She leads the way through her immaculate kitchen to the back porch that overlooks the pasture behind my father’s stables. The mares are grazing with their little ones. We’ve had ten foals born in the last few weeks, ten Lowry mules that will be ready to sell next spring. But it is the mares I stop to admire. Some muleteers make the mistake of breeding their best jack donkeys with inferior horses. My father says, “It’s all in the mare. The best mules come from superior mothers. The jack’s important, but the mare is everything.”
So far he’s been right.
I sit down on the stool we always use. It sets me low so Jennie can reach, and my knees jut up awkwardly at my sides. I feel like a child every time I relent to a cropping, but it is our ritual. Jennie is not affectionate or warm. When she cuts my hair, it is the only time she touches me. When I was thirteen, I ran away from St. Joe, all the way back to my mother’s village. It took me three days to get there on horseback, but the village was gone, and I returned to my father’s house after a week, filthy and bereft, expecting a switch and a severe scolding. Instead, Jennie sat me down and cut my hair. She didn’t ask me where I’d been or why I’d come back. Her gentle hands made me weep, and I cried as she snipped. She cried too. When she was finished, she made me wash until my skin was raw. Then she fed me and sent me to bed. My father told me, in no uncertain terms, that the next time I left without word, I would not be welcomed back. You wanna go? Go. But be man enough to tell us you’re leaving.
“You have a fine head of hair, John Lowry.” It is what she always says, yet she always wants to cut it off. She begins her work, snipping and clipping, until she sets down her shears, brushes off her apron, and lifts the cloth from my shoulders, shaking it out briskly into the yard.
“Is my father unwell?” I ask suddenly. I can see I have startled her, and her surprise reassures me. Little gets past Jennie.
“You live here, John Lowry. You work with him every day. You know he is not.”
She brushes the clippings from my neck.
“He is not himself today,” I grunt.
“He suffers when you go,” she says softly.
“That’s not true.”
“It is. It is the suffering of love. Every parent feels it. It is the suffering of being unable to shield or save. It is not love if it doesn’t hurt.”
I know she’s right. She knows she’s right too, and we fall silent again. I put my hat back on my head, covering Jennie’s handiwork, and I stand, towering over her. I realize, like a boy who has hit a growth spurt overnight, that Jennie is very small. I have never thought of her that way, and I stare down at her plain little face like I am seeing it for the first time. I want to embrace her, but I don’t. She reaches out and clasps my hand instead.
“Goodbye, John Lowry.”
“Goodbye, Jennie.”
She follows me through the house and out onto the front porch, watching as I descend the steps and move out into the street.
“John?” she calls, and the plaintive sound of my first name, alone without the Lowry tacked on, makes me stop.
I turn.
“It’s worth
it, you know.”
“What is, Jennie?”
“The pain. It’s worth it. The more you love, the more it hurts. But it’s worth it. It’s the only thing that is.”
2
THE CROSSING
NAOMI
After supper, Wyatt, Will, Webb, and I leave the sprawling encampment of waiting wagons and impatient travelers and climb a bluff overlooking the city and the banks of the churning river. The water of the Missouri swirls like Webb’s hair when he wakes, bending in all directions. I asked the man at the tack shop—the man named Lowry who has a reputation for selling the best mules—why they call it the Big Muddy.
“The bottom of the lake is sand, and it’s always shifting and resettling, creating new channels and swales beneath the surface. It bubbles and churns, kicking up the mud. If you fall in, you’ll have a hard time coming out.”
This place is not what I expected. We came from Springfield, Illinois, and Illinois didn’t seem like it would be all that different from Missouri, but there is no quiet in St. Joseph. No stillness. No space. Music spills from the gambling houses, and men seem to be drunk at all hours of the day. Crowds gather everywhere—the outfitters, the landing areas, the auctions. There’s even a crowd outside the post office, where people push and shove, wanting to get their letters sent before they head out into the unknown. When I closed my eyes and thought of the journey west, I always pictured distance, endlessness. Wide open spaces. I guess that will come, but not in St. Joe.
Everywhere I look there are wagons and animals and people—all kinds of people. Some dirty and some dandified, and in every manner of dress and dishabille. White men and dark men and minstrel girls and preacher’s wives, thumping their Bibles from wagon beds. Some folks are selling and some are buying, but they all seem to want the same thing. Money . . . or a way to make it. Yesterday, outside of Lowry’s Outfitters, a group of Indians—there had to be more than two hundred of them—walked right down the center of the street, their feathers and colors on full display, and the crowds parted for them like the waters of the Red Sea. They hurried down the banks to board the ferries, along with everyone else, but no one made them wait in line. I learned later they were Potawatomi, and I stared until Wyatt grabbed my arm and hurried me onward.
“You’re staring, Naomi. Maybe they don’t like that,” he warned.
“I’m not staring. I’m memorizing,” I said.
Memorizing. It is what I am doing now. Noting the details and committing them all to memory so I can recreate them later.
The line of clustered wagons waiting to cross the Missouri stretches from the landing docks to the bluffs that rim St. Joseph. There is a great fervor to be among the first to cross. Better grazing, less dust, better camping, less disease. We thought about crossing the river farther north, in Council Bluffs, and staying on the north-side route all the way to the Oregon Territory. But Council Bluffs is nothing more than a campground with everyone fighting to cross the river first and no safe way to do it. In Council Bluffs there are too many Mormons, and Mr. Caldwell doesn’t want to travel with them. Mr. Caldwell doesn’t like the Mormons, though I don’t think he’s ever met one and probably wouldn’t know if he had. Mr. Caldwell doesn’t like anyone he doesn’t understand, which to my way of thinking includes women, Indians, children, Mormons, Catholics, Irishmen, Mexicans, Scandinavians, and anyone who is different from him, which—again—includes most people.
The rumors of no steamboats in Council Bluffs and disastrous crossings on scows that could only hold two wagons convinced us that jumping off farther south would be safer, even if it extended our initial journey. Plus, we heard tell that St. Joseph was a real city with shops and streets. St. Joe had outfitters and steamboats and mules—good Missouri mules.
The younger John Lowry flits through my thoughts, and I push his image away. I’ve been pushing it away all day. The knowledge that he is traveling with us has filled me with a strange anticipation, and I haven’t yet sorted myself out. I plan to think about him before I sleep, when my brothers aren’t chatting in my ears and there isn’t so much to see.
We wanted to be in the first wagon train on the trail out of St. Joseph, but that was what everyone wanted, and everyone couldn’t be first. At this rate, we might be last. The moment the grass covered the prairie, the wagon trains began leaving the jumping-off points along the river, pushing westward. Pa has been saying for weeks, “Leave too early, and there’s no grass for the animals. Leave too late, and the grass will be gone, consumed by earlier trains.” He’s also said, more times than I can count, “Leave too early, and you’ll freeze and starve on the plains; leave too late, and you’ll freeze and starve in the mountains.”
Early or late, I’m just ready to go. I’m as hungry for this journey as I’ve been for anything in my life. I don’t know why, exactly. Going west was never my dream. It was Daniel who wanted to go west. It was Daniel who convinced our families to sell their farms in Illinois and strike out for California. It was Daniel who persuaded us all and Daniel who would never see it. Three months after we were married and a few days shy of my nineteenth birthday, he took sick and was gone in a week. When he died, I suspected I was pregnant, but heavy cramping and bleeding a few days after Daniel’s death removed that fear. I was heartbroken and . . . relieved. I didn’t want to be a widow and a mother. It was not an emotion I could easily explain without sounding vile, even to myself, so I didn’t try. I’m convinced everyone is a little vile, if they are honest about it. Vile and scared and human.
I missed him terribly in the weeks after. I tried not to. It didn’t do me any good. The pain was useless, and I was never one to wallow. I got angry instead. I got busy. I worked from sunup to sundown. It was planting season, and there was plenty to do. So I did it. I worked all my anger into the ground where Daniel slept, but I didn’t water his grave with my tears. It wasn’t until I sat down on a Sunday afternoon, when the harvest was over and the cold was setting in, that I found myself drawing his face. And then I couldn’t stop. I drew picture after picture—Daniel in all the stages of his life. Daniel as a boy pulling my hair and scaring the chickens. Daniel as a brother. Daniel as a son. Daniel as a husband, and Daniel in the grave.
I cried then. I cried and drew until my fingers were bent like claws. But I only kept one. I gave another to his mother—an unsmiling portrait of the man I married—and buried the rest in the dirt beside him.
I haven’t cried the same way since. It still hurts, but it’s been more than a year, and I am resigned to it. The Caldwells say that I am one of them now, that I am part of their family, but I still feel like a May, and without Daniel, I feel no permanent obligation to them. When I informed them that I would be traveling west with my parents in their wagon, Mr. Caldwell protested vehemently, and Elmeda, Daniel’s mother, looked at me with Daniel’s wounded eyes.
“My mother needs me,” I said simply. It was true, but mostly I couldn’t abide being anywhere near Mr. Lawrence Caldwell. Had Daniel lived, I would have been driven crazy by the end of our journey. Their daughter, Lucy, and their new son-in-law, Adam Hines, will be traveling with them, along with their sixteen-year-old son, Jeb. They’ll make do just fine without me. And being called Mrs. Caldwell makes my hackles rise. Mr. Caldwell has taken to calling me Widow Caldwell, as if I have entered old age without having ever lived the intervening years. I think Mr. Caldwell likes drawing attention to Daniel’s death. It makes folks behave more kindly to him, and it’s his way of laying claim to me. Ma and my brothers are the only ones who just call me Naomi. I suppose widowhood at such a young age gives me a certain freedom some girls don’t yet enjoy, if freedom means being allowed a bit of leeway in speech and conduct. People who hear my story shake their heads and cluck their tongues, sometimes in judgment but generally in sympathy, and I am mostly left alone, which suits me fine.
Webb tugs at my skirt and points to the river, his words tumbling over themselves trying to be first. “There’s Mr. Lowry! He’s got his mules.
Look at his donkeys! Those are Mammoth Jacks. For breeding with the mares.” Webb knows too much about breeding for an eight-year-old, but I’m sure he’s right. He goes right on babbling about stallions and jennies and their offspring, called hinnies, which supposedly aren’t nearly as desirable as mules.
John Lowry is one of a swarm, and it takes me a moment to pick him out. John Lowry Sr., his shock of white hair easily identifiable, follows behind, waving his hat and driving the animals forward. Twelve mules are strung together in two long lines behind the younger John Lowry’s horse, the two donkeys Webb is so excited about bringing up the rear. Fine animals, the lot of them. The donkeys are black and lanky, with long ears, thin noses, and oversize eyes. They look almost comical, like childish drawings that trotted off the page and grew with every step. Despite their spindly legs and narrow hips, they are the biggest donkeys I’ve ever seen, their backs as tall as the powerful string of Lowry mules being led to the water’s edge.
With no hesitation, the younger John Lowry urges his horse, a tawny bay with powerful haunches and a thick neck, into the muddy waters. The mules and the jack donkeys follow him with only a little urging and immediately begin swimming hard toward the opposite shore. A skiff, loaded with packs and paddled by a huge Negro, sets off about the same time, keeping an easy distance from John Lowry and his animals. I’m guessing the man’s been hired to get Lowry’s supplies across so they don’t get wet in the swim.
“Look at ’em go!” Webb crows, jumping up and down and waving his arms, cheering them on.
“He makes it look easy, doesn’t he?” Wyatt says, less exuberant but every bit as transfixed. “Everyone else fighting and pushing for a place in line, and he just goes into the water, easy as you please, and starts swimming.”