Where the Lost Wander

by Harmon, Amy

  “I know. And that’s my fault. So I’m going to find a way to replace her.”

  “How was it your fault?” John asks.

  “He was trying to hurt me by getting rid of you.”

  “Mr. Caldwell?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Getting rid of me . . . that would hurt you?” he asks.

  “It would hurt me.”

  He is silent for several heartbeats, thinking that over, finishing off his supper.

  “You are like Jennie,” he says, his voice odd.

  “I am?” I gasp. “The white woman who raised you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How am I like Jennie?” I’m not sure the comparison pleases me.

  “You are very stubborn.”

  “Says the man who loves mules.” I shrug.

  He laughs, startled. I seem to startle him a lot. “I do love mules.”

  “Do you love Jennie?” I ask. I don’t want to remind him of someone he dislikes.

  “Yes. But I don’t understand her.”

  “What is it you don’t understand?”

  “She loves my father.”

  “Your father didn’t seem all that hard to love.”

  “He is cold. I am afraid I am like him.” John sounds as if he is warning me away. “Why would Mr. Caldwell want to hurt you?” he asks, changing the subject. His eyes cling to the darkness beyond the wagons as though he is not intent on my answer, but I am not fooled.

  “I haven’t grieved enough,” I say, my voice flat.

  His eyes swing back and hold mine for several breaths.

  “Was he like his father?” he asks, and it takes me a moment to catch up.

  “Who?”

  “Your husband. Daniel. Was he like his father?” He is not looking at me again.

  “I would say no . . . but I’m not sure if that is true. Maybe he would have become like his father. I don’t think we knew each other very well. Not deep down. We were children together, but we weren’t . . . grown . . . together. Then he was gone, and the growing and learning ended.”

  “It’s hard to truly know someone,” John whispers.

  “Yes. It is.” I nod. I feel like I hardly even know myself.

  “But still . . . you married Daniel.”

  “We were friends. We were fond of each other. And there was no one else. It was a very . . . obvious thing to do.” I want to defend myself further, but I stop. John knows what kind of world we live in. Women and men marry. It is survival. It is life. I have no doubt Warren will marry again. Adam Hines too. It is simply the way of things.

  “You do not know me either, Naomi,” he says, challenging me, using my words against me. “Not deep down.”

  “But I want to,” I say, enunciating each word. “I want to know you. Deep down. How many people do you truly want to know?”

  “I can’t think of any,” he admits, reluctant to concede the point. And I can’t help but laugh.

  “I can’t either,” I say. “It’s too hard. I’d rather draw faces than know what’s going on behind them. But I don’t feel that way about you. I want to know you.”

  He begins to nod, and I’m encouraged to ask, “Do you want to know me, John?”

  “Yes, Naomi,” he murmurs. “I want to know you.”

  And that is enough for me.

  We settle into a weary acceptance of life on the trail; I call it the daze of endless days, but death has fallen behind us, perhaps wearied by our plodding steps, and we pass two merciful weeks without digging a grave or counting a loss.

  I am happy.

  It is a peculiar thing, being happy when life is so hard and dirty and tiresome that every day feels like a war and every night I sleep on a bed so hard my skin is as bruised as my face is freckled. I have never known such utter and complete exhaustion, and yet . . . I am happy. Ma gave Wolfe life, but he is mine in a way that I can’t put into words. Maybe it is all the time I spend caring for him or the responsibility I feel for him. Maybe it’s a continuation of the love I have for Ma, who is too weak and tired to mother him alone, but he is mine, and my arms feel empty when he’s not in them.

  The boys mother him too; it’s like he’s always been ours, waiting eagerly on the other side of transcendence for his turn to be a May, and now that he’s here, none of us can remember life without him. He smiles—Ma says I was a smiler early on, just like him—and he’s so aware and bright eyed, kicking his legs and moving his mouth when we talk to him, like he’s trying to talk back. Webb hovers only inches above his face and has long one-sided conversations with him, telling him about the mules and the horses and California, and Wolfe just seems to soak it all in.

  Still, as sweet as he is, as good as he is, he doesn’t want to settle at night. Maybe it’s the constant rocking of the wagon that lulls him to sleep during the day, but at bedtime, Ma and I take turns walking him so he doesn’t keep the whole company awake.

  Some nights I walk to where John keeps watch—he always takes the first shift—and sit beside him, letting Wolfe fuss where no one can hear him, and we talk of stars and simple things. He’s taught me some Pawnee words. He doesn’t call Wolfie by his name, even though he chose it. He calls him Skee dee—the Pawnee word for wolf. And there are plenty of them. We’ve seen signs of the buffalo, their chips and skulls bleached white in the sandy swales, but our most frequent guests are the wolves. They lurk on the ridges and follow the trail, and Ma has dreams that they’ll drag Wolfie away.

  One night, so weary I cannot stay awake, I fall asleep in the grass with Wolfe in my arms and wake without him. For a moment I don’t know where I am or how long I have slept. I can’t remember if it was I who held him last. I jump to my feet, noting John’s blanket around my shoulders, and I see his silhouette against the blue-tinged darkness. I almost cry out, caught in Ma’s nightmare. Then I see the smooth line of Wolfe’s head bobbing against John’s shoulder, an occasional hiccup blending with the lowing of the cattle and the whisper of night sounds all around. He walks with him, talking softly in a language I can’t understand, pointing at the sky and the cows, the moon and the mules, and I am overcome with grateful awe.

  John is careful. He says little and rests even less. Maybe his quietude is simply the wear of long days and short sleeps, and I don’t know if he shares the same comfort in my presence that I feel in his, but I think he does. I feel more than comfort. I feel fascination and fondness and a desire to follow wherever he goes. I want to hear his thoughts. I want to look at him.

  He does not touch me. He does not take my hand or sit as close as I’d like him to. Not since the day in his tent when he told me I was beautiful has he indicated how he feels, and I can only guess that his words of admiration were delirium, caused by his illness. But when I seek his company, he does not ask me to go, and when the night is deep and the camp is quiet, he talks to me. And though we do not speak of love or a life together, I am happy. I know it’s wrong to be so when Warren and Elmeda are so lonely and Ma is so worn. But John makes me happy, little Wolfe makes me happy, and my happiness makes me strong.

  “How old are you, John?” I ask him one night.

  “I don’t know. I think I am probably twenty-five or twenty-six.”

  “You think? You don’t know when you were born?”

  “No.”

  “Not even the season? Your mother didn’t tell you anything?”

  “I think it must have been winter. There was snow on the ground. She said when she rose from her bed after my birth, there was a single set of footprints around the lodge. The tracks were odd, like a man wearing two different shoes, and they weren’t deep even though the snow came to her knees. She followed them a ways, and they just suddenly stopped.” He is silent for a moment, contemplating.

  “Who was it?” I press.

  “She never discovered, but it is how I got my name.”

  “Two Feet. Pítku ásu’.” I’ve been practicing.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her
,” I say.

  “I don’t remember very much,” he says, quiet.

  “What was her name?”

  “My father called her Mary. The whites she worked for called her Mary too.”

  “Son of Mary, walking on the water,” I whisper, thinking of Ma’s dream.

  “Her people called her Dancing Feet. So I suppose I have a . . . part . . . of her name.”

  “Why Dancing Feet?”

  “When she was young, she sat too close to the fire, and the edge of her blanket caught a spark that quickly became a flame. Instead of screaming and letting the blanket go, she stamped the blaze out with her feet.”

  “Like a dance.”

  “Yes. That is the way most names come about. Some of the children don’t have names until they are half-grown.”

  “But you did,” I say.

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Did she look like you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t really remember her face.” He turns his palms up helplessly. “I don’t think so. I look like my father. He never doubted I was his. But . . . I think I might have her mouth. She did not smile much, but when she did, her lips would rise higher on one side. She had a crooked smile.”

  I want to press for details, needing to see her in my mind so I can create her on paper, but I hold myself back, letting him study the sky in silence, searching his memory.

  “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.

  But my avoidance lasts only as long as I’m not on watch. The moment I’m alone with the herd, the camp quiet, I’m watching for her, and she doesn’t disappoint.

  I’m cautious when I am with her. I don’t get too close. I don’t touch her cheeks or her little brown hands. They are so brown from the sun they don’t look like they belong to her. I don’t try to kiss her. Scaring her away with a kiss didn’t work out so well. I didn’t end up scaring her at all, but damn if I didn’t scare myself. So I keep the space between us, even in the darkness when she walks with Wolfe or makes a nest in the grass.

  During the day, we keep our distance, but there is no privacy in the train, and I am too aware of curious stares. Webb is always underfoot, Will too, though I don’t mind much. They’re good boys, all the Mays. It’s like my father said. It’s all in the mother; the jack doesn’t make much difference. Winifred May is a damn good woman, and William knows it, which is to his credit. The best thing about him is her. I don’t care for William much, but I haven’t met many men I’ve especially liked. They’re suspicious of me, I’m suspicious of them, and that’s the way of it.

  Still, I watch Naomi and she watches me, and a train of tir
ed people, gaunt faced and bleary eyed, watches us. I can’t help myself. She is too thin. All the women are. The men too, shrunk down to gristle and grit. We don’t think about how the food tastes; we just shovel it in, whatever it is. But where others are stooped and skittish, she is slight and straight, shoulders back, eyes steady.

  Looking at Naomi makes me feel a little crazy. She matters too much, and I’ve begun to believe that I might have her, that I might make it all the way to California with my mules and my money and Naomi too. I’ve begun to hope, and I’m not sure I like the way it feels. It’s a little like being thrown from a horse or a green mule and hitting the ground so hard the breath is chased from your chest. For a moment you think you’re a goner. Then the air floods back in, and the relief is so strong you just lie there and suck it in.

  And you can’t suck it in fast enough.

  That’s what hope feels like: the best air you’ve ever breathed after the worst fall you’ve ever taken. It hurts.

  Adam Hines pays a few visits to her campfire, along with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Caldwell. His wife has been dead a month, and he’s looking for another. I don’t think he’s a bad man. Just a weak one. Or a typical one. I don’t know. The deacon’s daughter has let it be known she’ll take him on, but she’s not as pretty as Naomi. Not as smart or as capable. Not as funny or as fierce. Not by a long shot. So Adam’s stopped by to see if Naomi will have him.

  I stay away to let her decide, my anger and my painful hope sitting on my shoulders, fighting back and forth. I see how men look at her. Even the married ones. Especially the married ones. Hell, Abbott even looks at her, and he informed me he doesn’t have any feeling anymore between his legs.

  “Got kicked good and hard by a horse a few years back. Never been the same since,” he says. “Can’t say I miss it.”

  I wish I didn’t have any feeling between mine. I don’t want to be another panting dog, though Naomi doesn’t treat me like one. She doesn’t give Adam Hines any encouragement. She doesn’t give any of the other men her attention or her time. But I will not compete. I will not woo her. And I will not be a spectacle for a train of emigrants who have nothing better to do than watch me watch her. Still, I feel closer to her than I have ever felt to anyone before.