by Harmon, Amy
“No?” I ask.
“Not the kind you put on paper.”
“What other kind are there?”
“The kind you speak. I’m interested in those words.”
I grunt, not really understanding.
“I like a good conversation. At least with interesting people. You are an interesting person. I would like to talk to you more often.” Her brow furrows, and she frowns. “Pa says if I don’t learn to hold my tongue, I’m going to get myself in trouble. Do you think I’m trouble, John Lowry?”
“You know I do.”
She laughs.
“And don’t call me John Lowry,” I grumble. When she says John Lowry like that, it makes me think of Jennie, and I don’t want Naomi to remind me of Jennie.
“How about I call you John and you call me Naomi?”
I nod once, but I don’t think I’ll be calling her anything other than Mrs. Caldwell. Not out loud. “If you aren’t writing words, what are you doing?” I press.
“Drawing. If the pictures are good enough, you don’t need words.”
“Can I see?” I ask.
She thinks about it for a minute, her eyes on mine, like she’s trying to unpeel me. I look away. I find I can’t look at her very long. I forget myself, and my mules always know when I’m not paying attention.
“All right. But promise me one thing,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
I jerk, surprised, but I don’t think she’s teasing. She hands me the leather book and swiftly turns her head, looking forward. I don’t think she wants to watch me look through her pages. Her embarrassment, something she seemed impervious to, makes the moment more intimate, and I am suddenly reluctant to open the small clasp that keeps the pages together.
“You promised you wouldn’t be afraid,” she scolds.
I didn’t promise, but I suppose my looking means I accept her terms. I wrap Dame’s reins and the lead ropes around the horn on my saddle so my hands are both free. I open Naomi’s book, wanting to see inside more than I’ve ever wanted to see anything, yet feeling like I’m about to bed her, inclined to rush yet not wanting to cause pain.
I expect landscapes—the river, the hills, the sky, with the plains stretching out on both sides—and there are some of those, all immediately recognizable. The creeks in Kansas and the lightning-forked skies and rain-soaked swales, the dead carcasses and the littered trail of belongings strewed across the ruts. A little grave, and then another, sitting beside an abandoned chest filled with delicate bone china. She’s labeled the picture Bones in Boxes.
But it is the faces that move me.
Faces fill the pages. I recognize Naomi’s mother—a weary smile beneath knowing eyes—and her father, who the boys favor, worn and hopeful. Pictures of her brothers, Abbott, the women who walk and the children who never seem to tire. She’s even drawn the little boy, Billy Jensen, who fell off the tongue of his father’s wagon three days out of St. Joe and was crushed by the wheels before the oxen could be halted.
She notes that I have paused and glances over to see what picture I am studying.
“I wanted to give that one of Billy to his mama. But I thought it might hurt too much just yet.”
I nod and turn the page. There are many pictures of me. Left side, right side, straight on, and from behind, and I like my face the way she sees it. I am stunned by her skill. Green-eyed women with pink mouths and freckled noses who talk too much and can’t take no for an answer don’t draw like that. I don’t know anyone, man or woman, who draws like that.
“I wanted to draw you the first time I saw you. I couldn’t stop staring,” Naomi says. “I sent you running off, but I couldn’t help it. You have a . . . a beautiful . . .” She stops midsentence and changes words. “You have an unforgettable face.”
I am hot and cold, pleased and puzzled. When I say nothing, she continues as though she desperately wants me to understand. “I would rather draw faces than anything else. Pa says the landscapes would have a better chance of selling to the newspapers or maybe in a printed book someday, but most of the time, the world just can’t compete with the people in it.”
I don’t know what to say as I stare down at my eyes and my mouth and the set of my chin. I see my father. My mother. I even see Jennie, and I wonder how that can be.
“It’s the emotion, I think,” Naomi says, still trying to explain herself amid my silence. “The expressions. The wind can blow and the rains beat down, and a landscape can be transformed eventually, but a face is always changing. I can’t draw fast enough to keep up. And every face is different. Yours is the most different of all.”
I shove the book back toward her, and she takes it uncertainly.
“John?”
“You’re very skilled, Mrs. Caldwell,” I say, so wooden and stiff I could toss myself into the Little Blue and float down it like a raft. I spur Dame forward, leaving Naomi and her many faces behind.
I do more than my fair share of night watch, considering there are sixty-five men and twenty-five grown boys in the company, but I won’t sleep well until the mules are delivered. I worry about my animals. The men are sloppy and weary, and there are too many cattle to watch and horses to picket. I keep my animals as close as I can, but more often than not, I pitch my tent where they graze and sleep with my ears wide open. Catching a nap most nights after dinner has saved me from exhaustion. Two nights after we cross the Big Blue, Webb May is waiting for me in my tent at the end of my shift, curled up on my bedroll with his head on my saddle and my blanket over his shoulders. I shake him awake.
“Webb. It’s the middle of the night. You have to go back to your wagon, boy. Your folks will worry.”
He sits up in alarm, clearly upset that he fell asleep at all.
“Ma’s havin’ her baby. She’s crying. It hurts real bad to have a baby, Mr. Lowry. We didn’t want to hear her cry, so I came here.”
“Let’s go. Come on,” I say, my chest tight with worry.
We aren’t far from the wagons when a cry splits the air, like a wolf on the wind.
“Do you hear that, Mr. Lowry?” Webb crows, and his drowsy face blooms in wonder.
The babe fills its lungs with breath and lets out another howl, and though it’s nigh on two in the morning, the camp stirs and shifts in audible relief.
I wait with the boys, huddled by the campfire Wyatt has kept stoked, and when William May climbs from his wagon, tears streaming down his cheeks, announcing that all is well and he has another son, I bid the boys good night.
When I round the wagons, I see Naomi, washing from a bucket brought up from the creek, her sleeves pushed up and the buttons at her neck opened to expose the pale column of her throat. Her dress is smeared with dark blotches, and her hair has come unbound. It reaches past her narrow waist and dances in the moonlight.
“The baby is well? Your mother too?” I ask.
“Yes. They’re doing just fine.” Her voice is flat, lifeless, and I draw up short. She shakes her hands dry, turns the bucket over, and sinks down on it, using it for a stool.
“It’s another boy. A beautiful . . . little . . . boy.”
“You wanted a sister?”
“I did. Not for me . . . for Ma. But he’s . . . he’s . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence, like she isn’t even sure how she feels. She tries again. “Ma wants me to name him. I can’t think of any names that begin with W. We’ve used them all up.” She looks up at me, her eyes weary and her mouth sad, and I don’t know what to say.
“Your name . . . is Naomi. Surely you . . . can pick a different letter.”
“They were going to name me Wilma, but Ma had a dream before I was born about Naomi from the Bible. She said it was a sign, so I’m the only one with a name that doesn’t start with W.”
“I like Naomi better than Wilma,” I confess softly.
“So do I. Thank you, Lord, for sending my ma a vision. Maybe you could send me one too? So I
know what to do?” She doesn’t really sound like she’s praying, though she’s looking at the sky. She sounds exhausted, and I search for the words to give her comfort and come up empty.
“Why are you here, John? It’s the middle of the night,” she asks.
“I found Webb asleep in my tent. He didn’t want to hear your mother cry.”
Naomi’s chin wobbles, and her lips begin to tremble, and I curse my fool self. She looks down at her soiled dress and takes a deep, steadying breath before she speaks again.
“She didn’t cry but for a minute, when the pain got real bad. And she cried quietly. She is the strongest person I know. She hardly even needed me. She knew what to do, every step of the way. I was too young to help when Webb was born—twelve years old—but Ma had a bed and midwife. I thought Mrs. Caldwell would come assist, but she’s down with the sickness. So many are laid low.”
“Joe Duggan, one of Mr. Hastings’s hired men, died tonight. Did you hear?” I ask, reluctant to share the news. The man succumbed to the disease quickly. He’d been fine at noonday.
“How many deaths does that make?”
“Five.”
“Good Lord.”
“Abbott says we’ll move out tomorrow, away from the cholera, if that’s what it is.”
“Oh no,” she moans. “I wanted Ma to have a day of rest.”
“It’s best we continue on to better water. People are getting their water in the puddles and along the banks.”
“It’s hard to get down to the creek. The mud is like a bog, and it sucks you deep. Will lost a boot trying to fill the buckets this evening.”
“I know.”
“Can we run from it? If people are sick, can we really run from it?”
“Running is all we can do,” I say. Naomi nods. She does not look like she could outrun a turtle at the moment. The word turtle makes me smile, despite myself.
“Is someone with your mother and the baby now?” I ask, hoping I can persuade her to retire. Dawn is not far off, and she needs to rest.
“Abigail is with her. The baby suckled, just the way he should, and he and Ma are sleeping. He is a sweet, precious little thing. He’s gonna be easy to love. In fact . . . I already do.” She presses a hand to her mouth like she’s holding back tears but doesn’t break down. She stiffens her back instead.
“You should sleep too; you try to do too much.”
“I don’t want to sleep. Not yet. I need to think of a name for my brother. He needs a name. He deserves a name. But I think best when I’m moving, so I’m going to walk a bit. Will you walk with me?”
I groan. We walk all day, yet she wants to walk.
“I won’t ask you to kiss me again,” she says, rueful. “I promise.”
I extend my hand to help her rise. “Five minutes. We will walk for five minutes. You are weary. I am weary.”
She sighs but nods her head in agreement.
“Do you have another name, John Lowry?” she asks.
I am silent a moment, considering. Is she asking for my Pawnee name?
“Just John Lowry? No middle name?” she presses, and maybe it is the darkness and her plaintive tone, but I find myself telling her something I have never told a soul.
“My mother called me Pítku ásu’.”
“Say it again,” she whispers, and I do. She tries to copy the sounds and does a fair job of it. “What does it mean?”
“Two Feet.”
“And how do you say turtle?” she says, teasing.
“Ícas.”
“I like it. But it doesn’t start with a W,” she says.
I smile, and she wilts, the steel in her spine bowing under her fatigue.
“He sounds like a wolf pup. It is the first thing I thought of when I heard his cry,” I offer.
She raises her eyes, studying me in the darkness. “My great-grandmother’s name was Wolfe. Jane Wolfe.”
“Wolfe May,” I say, testing it.
“Wolfe May,” she murmurs, nodding. “I like it. Lord knows he’s gonna need a strong name.”
“And it starts with W,” I add. She laughs softly, and my heart quickens at the glad sound.
“You should sleep now, Naomi.” Her name is sweet on my tongue, and I know I have revealed something I did not want her to see.
“I think I will, John. Thank you for helping me. Someday my brother will want to know how he got his name. I’ll tell him about you and about this journey.” She sighs and smiles faintly. “Wolfe May. Little wolf. It’s a good name.” She sounds at peace, and my heart swells at her words. I fold my arms so I’m not tempted to touch her, to comfort her further.
I do not say good night this time, but it is all I can do to walk away. I want to be near her. I duck inside the tent, where I found Webb only an hour earlier, but I do not stay there. Instead, I strip off my shirt and use a bit of soap and a bucket of water from Abbott’s barrel, scrubbing at my skin, trying to wash Naomi May from my thoughts. When we reach Fort Kearny, I will go back to Missouri, and she will continue to California. I will never see her again, and the knowledge sits like hunger in my belly, churning away at me the remainder of the night.
NAOMI
Ma resumes walking in the morning, baby Wolfe wrapped in a cloth bunting and secured to her chest. She and Pa don’t balk at the name I have chosen. In fact, they nod approvingly, recalling Grandma Wolfe, as I knew they would. I don’t tell them that it was John’s suggestion; it is a secret between the two of us. I do my best to absorb Ma’s duties for the first few days, allowing her to rest as soon as the train stops, preparing food, washing clothing, and looking after the family.
The sickness along the trail is making everyone jumpy. One family in the company loses their father and mother within hours of each other, leaving their four children, all under the age of ten, orphaned. An uncle takes them all in, only to lose his own wife the following day. The whole family—two wagons, eight children, one man, three sheep, and two teams of oxen—turns back for Missouri, a boy of fourteen at the helm of one team, and we all watch them go, stunned at the sudden wrath of death. If we were under any illusions about the difficulty and suffering we would all endure, those illusions have vanished, though I’m convinced the mind whispers little lies to us all. You’ll be fine. You’re stronger. You’re smarter. You’re better. You’ll be spared.
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 onl
y 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.