Paint the Wind

by Cathy Cash Spellman

  "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Song of Solomon 8:7

  April 18, 1854. Cod grant me strength to bear with this awful sorrow. My heart is a stone within me. Today I kissed good-bye my sisters and my brothers and their dear children. I saw my parents for the last time on this earth. All that I have in this world, save my Julia, Ezekial, Hachaliah, and little Daniel, has been shorn from me. All my life is in this horrid wagon where I write and pray for guidance. I am a wayward soul and question Cod's plan.

  "If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small." Proverbs 24:10

  Jewel felt the tears, and the anger, well in her as they always did when she read this book. How different were the diaries of the women like her mother, on the wagon trains headed west, from those written by the men. The women wrote of anguish at leaving home and kin, despair at the prospect of the hardships they would encounter along the way. Most of them would be pregnant on the six-month journey, or nursing the newly born, as they jounced away their lifeblood and strength in the springless flatbed wagons that carried them farther and farther from their homes and families.

  Mrs. Healy's baby died today [her mother's diary read]. Mrs. Fuller's little boy fell from the wagon and the wheel ran over his poor body crushing the life from his tiny bones.

  Tragedy made matter-of-fact by its frequency.

  Stopped to bury Cora Jensen and her three youngest last night. Bad water was the cause of the bowel flux that took them from us.

  For the men, there was the spirit of adventure, the camaraderie of hunting, fishing, Indian fighting, the possibility of riches and opportunities unheard of in the East. But for the women in exile, life held immeasurable misery. They bore the endless stream of babies that came, they nursed the relentless bouts of illness that plagued the doctorless trails, they bathed the bodies of the dead, if there was water for it, and sewed the shrouds to clothe them for their eternal sleep.

  The litany of Mrs. McClosky's life was echoed by all the other women on all the other wagon trains: give the baby suck, in its knotted sling that frees your hands to gather buffalo chips as you trudge behind the wagon... tie the remaining children by a rope to your waist as you ford the swollen stream. Unload everything inside the wagon—sometimes two thousand pounds of it— and load it all onto rafts to cross the rivers. Repack the lot on the other side. Cook what there is, on a fire of dried buffalo dung beside the wagon; avoid the rattlesnakes, if you can. Relieve yourself behind a wall of other women extending their homespun skirts to afford you some measure of privacy. Pray that your monthly "showing" comes at a time when there is a stream nearby to wash your bloody cloths, or else carry the fouled fabric patches with you until laundering is possible. Most women wore red flannel petticoats, so their monthly bloodstains would be less embarrassing.

  In truth, the diary was superfluous, for Jewel had every detail of her mother's life etched eternally in her soul. Every anguished step, from the moment they'd left Pittsford, their pitiful wagon loaded with less than enough to see them through, lived within her. To the grave, she would carry the look she'd seen on her mother's stoic face on the day they'd left their home behind forever. Staring straight ahead, eyes dulled by desperation, Mrs. McClosky had never once looked back as they'd pulled out of the rutted street where her home had been. But Jewel had.

  She'd seen the men smiling and waving their exuberant goodbyes. This terminal wrenching from all their wives held dear was no more to them than a chance for riches or adventure—she could see it in their laughing eyes and dancing horses, and in their haste to be under way. For Jewel had always, by some quirk of fate, understood the workings of men's minds.

  Jewel Mack, at her window in Oro City, let her body become one with the rocker's rhythm as she let her mind drift back, back, back in time to when she had been Julia...

  Twelve-year-old Julia McClosky was used to men staring at her with lust on their faces. Ever since her breasts had begun to develop the previous year, even before it had become apparent that they would continue to expand long past the point where it would have been seemly to stop, she had felt their glances and the change in the way they treated her.

  Boys from school, who had in the past made fun of her plain face and freckles, began to eye her with a furtive interest. Miners walking past her house with swinging lunch pails in their hands seemed to linger as they made their way toward the colliery. She was embarrassed by the magnitude of the changes in her body. Not that she didn't want to grow up, for with adulthood would come the chance of freedom, but the alterations in her form were not subtle ones like those of the other girls.

  Julia's rebellious breasts, which had begun sensibly as tender swelling places, had, in the space of one year's time, exploded into huge ripe melons that seemed to precede her indecently, no matter how hard she struggled to contain them. The other girls, too, had noticed her burgeoning womanhood and greeted it with envy and derision.

  But it wasn't the girls' attentions that troubled Julia most, or even that of the boys and men. It was the terrible new look she saw in her father's eyes whenever he was near, and the seemingly accidental touches she somehow knew weren't accidents at all. The bumping together in doorways where there was ample room not to; the prolonged hugs that hadn't happened before, the nightly tucking in that was a dreadful development.

  Long before the time when her father had first crept to her bed and forced her to submit to his gropings and fondlings, Julia had known that danger and perversion lurked behind his new awareness of her body.

  She could smell his whiskey breath, feel his scratching whiskers abrade her face, sense the nauseating danger.... She had never told her overburdened mother what she endured at his hands. She had endured alone. As long as she could remember, Julia had known and accepted her mother's frailty, and done the best she could to help her. As each successive baby had been born, she herself had taken on its rearing. Washing, diapering, clothing, and minding them, each new burden easing the ones her mother shouldered. She had done it gladly to save her mother's waning strength.

  So there was no way in hell she would ever have told her mother of the stinking, groping man who had ended her childhood so brutally. In fact, Julia had told no living soul of her shame in the two decades since then. Not even Ford Jameson—he had found out for himself.

  The quiet young man from the neighboring wagon had watched her, too, like so many other men on the wagon train, but not in the same way. Julia had felt Ford's shy eyes follow her as she left the wagon each morning, to begin her predawn chores. Several times' he had even helped her carry water in huge crockery jugs, or taken heavy firewood and buffalo chips from her arms as she struggled to balance them. Once he had killed a rattlesnake that lay in her path.

  Too shy to know what to say to a girl, Ford had never said much of anything at all to Julia. Unlike the lascivious glances of the other men that had made her blush at first, and then become defiant, Ford's watching made her feel protected, cherished. As if he cared about what happened to her.

  He was fifteen or sixteen and near as big as he would get in height at the time the train set out from St. Joe, but he was lean to the point of scrawniness and although the width of his shoulders promised future strength, he was nowhere near full growth. He traveled with his uncle and aunt to Oregon, and it was known about the train that he was a penniless orphan who had been taken in by them and none too gladly.

  Jewel blinked away the Colorado street outside her window and saw again, in her mind's eye, the stars gleam bright against the indigo sky beyond the McClosky wagon....

  Her mother's death from fever two weeks previously had left the girl both numb and agonized. Like a wound that has sliced through nerve endings and dulled them at the surface, but left a deeper unreachable agony sealed within, her mother's passing had left young Julia in mourning and despair. It had also left her with the full burden of her brothers and sisters to care for, and the full brunt of her father's attentions.

&
nbsp; Julia had taken to sleeping on the ground beneath the wagon. Fear of rattlesnakes held less terror for her than fear of her father's caresses.

  Thirteen-year-old Julia McClosky lay on the hard-packed earth and stared at the imperturbable heavens above her head, while she prayed to God for deliverance. Her mother's presence had stood between her father and her, in some intangible way. If things became too hideous, Mrs. McClosky could be told, Julia had fantasized in the worst of times. Now even that small protection had been taken away from her and terror had possession of her every waking hour. Julia looked up at the immense expanse of open land and sky and felt entrapped as she never had before; she could barely breathe for the tightening noose of danger.

  She could run away... but where, in this ocean of sand and hostile landscape? She could tell someone... but who would believe her story? And if they did, would they then not also know her shame?

  Shame. She felt It in every pore. Disgust and revulsion at the things she had submitted to. Probings and fingerings of a more and more intimate nature, only held back at all by the knowledge of the mother sleeping ignorant in the next room. Now her mother slept forever and there would be no stopping her father's sweating, ugly lust that had insinuated itself into her consciousness, so that all hope of happiness and goodness had been blotted out.

  Jewel sighed away the ugly memory, closed the tattered cloth cover of the precious diary, and let her gaze take in the scene on the street below. This was the here and now, she reminded herself —all that plagued her so grievously had been then. It was Fancy's plight that had called it all up so vividly in her mind...

  How long ago was it, when she had decided never to live the life of the women on that train? So long had the need not to live her mother's life been with Jewel that she seemed to have been born with it. Anyone hearing her life story would have concluded that the tragedy on the wagon train had set her course, but Jewel knew this was not so. Long before that, she had vowed no man would ever own her as her mother had been owned. The tragedy on the trail had only proved that Fate agreed with her.

  Ford Jameson could shoot a good deal better than most farm boys. He could tell a good gun from a bad by the sense of it in his hand, could hunt as well as the older men on the wagons whose job it was to keep the train supplied with jackrabbits, coyotes, and any other creatures God chose to set near to the wagons.

  The type of shooting Ford was practicing every chance he got, out of sight of the others, was a different kind entirely. His father's old Smith & Wesson pistol and a Henry rifle were the only legacy from his long-dead parents. He wasn't sure when he'd realized he had a knack for guns. Long, long ago, he supposed; time out of mind.

  He could clear the holster with the S&W as quick as you could blink your eye. It would've been quicker, too, if he could have tied the leather to his leg as he'd heard the professional shootists did. It was not that Ford wanted to be a pistoleer or anything lawless, rather that he had always been an outcast, unwanted and alone, and outcasts had the need to protect themselves.

  There was no excess ammunition on the train, where every item counted as the possible difference between life and death, so he couldn't practice shooting much, except when he hunted. But every minute that was free he could practice the feel of things. The feel of the weapon in the cup of his hand, the way the handle seemed to fit his palm as if born there, the fluid grace of the draw that was swift as God's own retribution. The sense of the cold blue-black steel barrel as an extension of his hand and arm, an extension as natural as the pointing of a finger.

  No one knew, of course. If there was one thing you could say about Ford Jameson, it was that he kept his own counsel.

  "Unnaturally quiet" his mother had called him when he was a toddler who didn't cry when he bumped his head and who asked for little in a household that had not enough of anything. But he had always known he wouldn't get what he asked for, so it had seemed pointless to him to ask.

  He was a quiet boy and self-contained. He had, in the absence of teachers, taught himself a code of conduct. He was kind to hurt things and vulnerable ones, who were not as strong as he, for he had a firm belief that he had been blessed with inordinate strength to make up for all he had not been given. He knew his Bible well, for his uncle spouted it night and noon, but while Ford loved the rhythm of the words and the power of the thoughts they conveyed, he felt only contempt for the man who prattled goodness endlessly, but was not good.

  Ford Jameson watched life, assessing it. He had an analytical mind without benefit of the schooling that might have honed his considerable gifts into brilliance. He read voraciously, a book always tucked inside the buttons of his shirt as he worked. How often had he wrapped a borrowed book carefully in cloth before tucking it in close to his skin? It wouldn't do to let sweat stains make him an undesirable borrower.

  He analyzed people, too. When you're quiet, people tend to pay you little mind, he'd found, so he had ample time for observation. And observe he did. The hypocrisies of the Sunday-school Christians who had none of Christ's charity in their souls; the pretensions of those who dismissed his worth, because he was an orphan with no prospects. And the kind ones like Auntie Mae, who looked for the good in a man and then blew on the drowsy spark of it to make a flame: "The Lord weighs the sins of the warm-hearted and those of the cold-blooded in different measures, "she had told him, and the words had become his standard.

  Auntie Mae had been the one lodestar of Ford Jameson's life. Soft, gentle, plump, giving with no thought of getting, she had taken the unnaturally quiet child to her heart and understood why he did not speak... so she had spoken. Endlessly, she had chatted to him of life and love and goodness; of how kindness is the single greatest good and meanness of spirit the single greatest sin. She had filled up the empty places in his soul and her simple faith had become his code. When she, too, died, he had been cast upon the charity of the uncharitable aunt and uncle with whom he now traveled.

  Ford Jameson had watched the young girl named Julia, with the large breasts, the sweet plain face, and the haunted eyes, from the first day the wagons had assembled at St. Joe. He had seen her herd the younger McClosky children efficiently and with long practice, seen the gentleness with which she treated her pregnant mother. He had seen, too, the fear that crossed the girl's face when her father was near. Did the man beat her? he wondered. Ford saw no evidence of it on her person, but that meant little, for it could be disguised.

  Something about the girl touched him. Not merely the quickening that her ripe body produced in him: it had become a fanaticism with him that he could ignore the weaknesses of the flesh. Co without water, food, rest. Co without love, kindness, speech. Only when you could conquer these needs could you be fully in control of your destiny. But something deeper, hidden, some subterranean vulnerability beneath the more obvious ones drew his attention to Julia. She became his silent study as much as the copy of Virgil he had borrowed from the Hendersons.

  He would watch and wait and somehow, sometime before the wagons reached Oregon, he would know her secret sorrow.

  If water hadn't been so scarce and tempers so short, maybe none of it would ever have happened—or at least not the worst of it.

  Three days into the Humboldt, the clothing hung in sweat-damp folds about the frightened travelers, the endless sand that filled their lives stuck in the creases of clothes and bodies; it rubbed their skin to blisters nearly as big as the ones raised by the sun. Water became an obsession, for there was not hear enough of it and things would be worse before they got better.

  Julia seldom wandered far from the wagons in the darkness of night camp, but something in her father's manner had made her wary on this particular evening. She wrapped her shawl tightly around herself and shuddered. The desert air, so viciously hot by day, was icy at night. She picked her way carefully among the sagebrush clumps; it wouldn't pay to disturb a sleeping rattler curled for his night's comfort beneath a bush.

  The immensity of the night sky made her fe
el freer and the cold seemed a blessing on her sun-scorched skin. She tried to pick out formations in the pinprick expanse of stars above her head. She heard him before she saw him—heard the crunch of stone on sand behind her. When she turned and saw her father, a small frightened scream gasped out of her before she knew she'd made a sound. He whirled her around to face him and she could see in his flushed face that he had been drinking.

  "No, Pa!" she pleaded, her voice a hoarse and childlike whisper as he pushed her down on the ground and wrestled her clothing from her shoulders, ripping hand-sewn buttons in his haste to free her breasts. Julia struggled against his hard, insistent strength. She should have screamed louder in the beginning, she thought later, but the horror of people running to help and finding out her shame had stopped her. And then it was too late. A hot hard thing was pushing at her, tearing at her private places. His hands, dirty with sand and gravel from the ground, were pulling her legs apart as his sweating body pinned her to the earth.

  Julia fought against the sickening intrusion with all her strength. "No, Pa, please, no!" she sobbed. "Don't do this to me." But he silenced her pleas with his hand on her mouth and then it was too late to scream. She felt him enter her—a searing, battering, tearing hurt that seemed to rend her in a way that could never be repaired. She shrieked into his hand and felt him pulled backward off her body with a grunting sound of surprise.

  Behind and above them stood Ford Jameson, taller than her father but nowhere near as broad. Julia saw her father jolted to his feet, hitching up his trousers as he went.