A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  Better spend the night right here, said the captain soberly. I have word there is a tree down.

  Tree down? Electa spun around. Papa?

  Lavina looked at her husband. She took Gina’s small hand, then hoisted her up around her waist.

  The captain said: We’ll have a better chance in daylight. Everything will be fine in the morning. We’re used to this.

  John’s mouth opened and words fell out. I want off.

  73

  They were on the wrong side of the river.

  May as well travel longside.

  Good to have company.

  Headin on up to Nebraska, so it don’t matter ta me.

  Give the boys some room there, hey?

  These families had been together on the John A Lucas for less than a day, during which they had kept to formalities, but now they became comradely. The man from the salon – the one not smoking – said they must find a trail and wait for a line of wagons. His name was Bentley. Keep together is the main thing. This is no place to be shruggin off alone.

  John had bought a flimsy cart instead of a wagon, saying they had not far to go. Electa was audibly crying because a reunion with Patton would now never happen. How was he to find them over here on the Kansas side? John said they would cross the river farther north. He said: We haven’t stepped off the side of the earth, have we? Wondering why he blamed himself for this latest circumstance, he decided it had become a bad habit, his sense of perpetual guilt. Lecta screamed that she would never, ever see her brothers again and nobody seemed to care and the way things were happening to keep them from having a shred of anything they needed in order to survive just made them look ridiculous for even trying and they ought to go back to Jonesville or St. Louis or someplace that had human beings. Everyone else on the John A Lucas has a wagon! Look at us! She said all she’d been living for was the reunion with Patton and, in her private mind, she added colors to the picture of her brother without even trying. His scarf. His hat. The way he would lift her up and dance her around. The way he made her feel more appealing than anyone else ever made her feel. Something in his grin, which he made with his whole broad face, even the eyes. But the Dickinsons were on the wrong side of the river with everyone else, climbing the bank yelling Gadup and Gee and Haw and shouting and smacking their animals and no one was listening to Electa, who pointed out that the other families had replaced their gear more successfully than her papa and, to the extent they were weary of the river and eager to set off on land that posed fewer hazards than water, they were counting their blessings and the animals pulled and strained while drivers tugged on the reins to slow them down or cracked whips to speed them up.

  Their cart was a wobbling, loose-wheeled mess.

  They were a line of four wagons and a rickety cart ten miles north of what had been the town of Palmyra, which had been burned to ashes a few days before. Some scabby house timbers poked out of the ground, but an hour after climbing the riverbank, the four wagons and one cart were strung out on a sea of waist-high grass where the sun had set the prairie glowing. At first there were tracks and bobolinks sang. Later there were only wheel ruts. Where were they going? They kept to high ground for fear of Indians but there was nothing, not so much as a tree on this edge of the world. The women climbed out of the wagons and brushed through the grasses in spite of the burrs that clung to their skirts. The men walked unless they drove. They had no trouble keeping pace with the animals and eventually they called a halt. They had escaped the river. The sun was down and all was quiet but for distant barks and cries and calls and howls. They built a fire, one fire for all. They sat around it: men, women, children, and there was a flute played and Gina and another child danced with the wind coming at them over a thousand miles of nothing else. The two children had danced on the Arabia, Gina and Caroline, holding hands to whatever music was played, and now they danced to Caroline’s father’s flute, which made the loneliest sound, out here on the prairie, any of the listeners had ever heard.

  Far far they were from anything but a cloggy river and a burned-out town.

  Lavina watched Electa linger outside a small group of girls who had traveled together on the John A Lucas before the Dickinsons came aboard. There were enough to make up a cluster of five the next morning and now in the big emptiness they gave Electa permission to learn their histories and walk alongside them. Some of them carried younger siblings on their backs or in their arms but none would give up the luxury of distance from parents after so many cramped days on steamboats or trails. A girl named Anya could do a meadowlark. Helen could do a cartwheel, Jennifer had seen the ocean; she had been on a sailing ship. Electa observed these allies. Bonnets were taken off. Sleeves were rolled up and stays loosened. As a group they developed their voices in order to be heard in this new, hollow world. Marjorie’s mother had died in Kentucky and her father would not turn back. Fathers and brothers were looking for the route west, although it was marked by fresh graves. The girls didn’t speak of it. Out in the open they didn’t remind each other that the ground under them was full of travelers like themselves and that the farther they moved on it, the more likely they were to join the ones in the earth. The truth of it was they were deathly afraid of death. Cholera. Brain fever. Indians. Passed 2 graves 1 dead cow with flies on it made 10 miles.

  On the second night, camping by a stream, there were a few cottonwoods at creek edge and a racetrack was established between the two tallest trees. Gina had tucked up her skirt and double-knotted the laces on her boots although her hair was untied and so was her sash. She wanted to race. She was not coughing anymore and little Caroline, her dancing friend, was a good runner and they could go as a team. Can we do a relay? Electa and Helen petitioned Anya, the lark. They want a race. Caroline’s father wandered over with his flute and established a starting point. Teams were chosen. Three children on each of two teams. The flute was blown. Caroline and a boy named Edward flew from one cottonwood to another and back. Then Caroline touched Gina’s shoulder and Gina leapt forward. Her face was flushed. She was a flying fox darting to a tree straight ahead until she heard her sister’s shout, took a quick look, and ran back to the starting tree. The other runners fell in behind her, gasping and frightened without knowing why. Then they saw a blur coming out of the horizon, a storm of ponies in swirling dust. A minute later, the whooping riders circled, dismounted, and came up close, sniffing at a skewer of grilling meat. John made a motion to Electa and Gina: Come!

  The visiting Pawnee were soon joined by their women, who materialized in large numbers from the surrounding dark. John squinted, trying to bring into focus these figures wrapped in blankets. His vision was blurred. They looked like mirages. One woman approached him, wanting to trade her pony for Gina’s. She ran back and forth between the two animals but John shook his head, saying: No trade, and thought of the pointlessness of bargaining with people who didn’t abide by rules. Most of the Pawnee men wanted gunpowder; some wanted whiskey. Everyone wanted tobacco and they rifled through the wagons looking for knives and pans and mirrors and clothes. It made for an uneasy night, the Pawnee sleeping around the fire, the emigrants hard awake in their wagons. The Pawnee had ignored the cart, so there was benefit in poverty, and the mule was valueless, but they took a cow off and butchered it while John sat on the ground grinding his teeth and rubbing his eyes and while Lavina and the girls huddled together in the cart, sitting upright.

  By morning, the Pawnee were gone, vanished into the ocean of whispering grass, the mounds and gullies, the borderless sky.

  But that afternoon they were surprised by the sight of a dead Pawnee on the ground. He’d been scalped. His throat was cut. John went to the body, meaning to pray. He was advised to stay back. They rise up to haunt ya, one of the men announced. Another said: Might just be playin dead.

  We must bury him, John replied.

  But no one agreed. They are part of nature, a middle-aged woman said. Leave him for the buzzards.

  In fact, such creature
s were gathering.

  Leave me be. A memory of Emly’s voice tore at his heart.

  They were traveling across an area in dispute between the Pawnee and the Potawatomi. They knew this when a small detachment of Potawatomi stalked through their line of wagons carrying a Pawnee prisoner. The Pawnee was wearing a wolfskin and nothing else but a rawhide knife girdle. Within minutes there were gunshots and various Natives ran through the line of wagons. Ignored in the instantaneous little battle, the white people went on somberly, facing the future in all ignorance.

  That afternoon they came to a cut in the prairie at the bottom of which a stream flowed. The men unfastened their horses and rode up and down looking for a ford but there was no safe place to cross. Someone said it might be advisable to lower the wagons down the side of the creek with ropes, but the men decided to lead the animals down the bank and over the fast-flowing creek using prods and brakes. The water was so transparent that red and gold rocks could be seen in its shallows, but it was raging enough that cows would have to be tethered to the wagons or they might be swept away. Horses and mules could be ridden through the water pulling the wagons but the opposite side was steep.

  John and Lavina conferred. They had little confidence in their cart but John had been told it would float. Seaworthy is what the stableman called it. Good as a fish. Women and children climbed inside their wagons, holding tight. Lavina asked if Gina might ride in the flute player’s wagon with Caroline. It was not the stream that concerned her, but the sand. The wagons had brakes, but on the cart, back wheels would have to be chained and sticks thrown into the front spokes to slow the descent. If the cart plunged, it would fly apart. Lavina sat firm on its narrow seat, holding the reins wrapped tightly around her hands like the bonds of captivity while John faced away from the water, faced his mule, moving backward step by step, watching the hooves, Now, whoa there. Whoa. Now there, now there, whoaaa…In front of the cart, the two little girls were peeking out of the back of the flute player’s wagon, encircled by the white canvas cover, two heads with a ruffle around them and the flute player shouting at his wife: Hold em tight. The night before, the little girls had made flags by shredding broad leaves. Each of them now had a flag to wave as the flute player’s wagon jerked to a sudden stop and little Caroline tumbled out.

  John, with his back to that wagon and his over-rubbed eyes fastened to his mule, had just yanked hard to urge the mule forward when Lavina saw the child fall out and the small face get trampled by her mule first and then by the cart’s iron wheel, the mother screaming along with Lavina and a cry going up, a hue and cry as the mother leapt out and tried to haul her child out of trampled sand.

  John stood stunned, all hope gone on the bank of the unnamed stream where the small child crushed by the wheel of his newly bought cart was being gathered up, broken and limp. He had watched the little girl sleep in her mother’s arms the night before. Bound for Oregon, was how the father had put it then, and tears ran down John’s face, the flute player going along the line of wagons looking for someone to help him bury his child and the men collecting in a knot as if they could undo John’s mistake. They circled and gathered, the women held to each other, all of them mothers of children who might so quickly become dead. Tears to swell the innocent creek. My fault, each mother would think if such a thing happened to her child: I did it by following my husband on his unholy trek. By now, at this stage of the journey, the encouragement they might have offered a husband back at home was forgotten and the future mythology of this journey and their brave portion was unknown to them. John moved his tongue in and out of his dry mouth, begging God to raise up the child, asking what he had done to earn this latest signal of His displeasure…oh God…and he found himself standing in front of the father, hat in hand. I am a minister of the Lord, he heard himself say.

  The father pointed to the lump of muslin he held, a lump that might have held potatoes, something to eat or to plant, instead of his child, and Lavina took hold of John’s elbow and pulled. What if it had been Gina? But Gina was the last of a large family and that mister and missus had nobody else and how would they go about ever fixing a meal or washing another dish? What would they do with the clean pinafores? John and Lavina’s murderous cart was reconnected with solid ground and the mothers had muttering mouths and the men had shaking heads. Then there were brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them and the child’s father took up his lump of muslin and everyone followed him to the hasty grave they had dug, wind blowing at skirts and hats.

  74

  Martin came into the town feeling saved. All that is in the world is not of the Father but is of the world! Chez Les Kanses, where the Kansas and Missouri rivers met and the Kansa Indians lived on steep bluffs at the landing place, where deer fed on green willows and wild apples and where, in the west bottoms, French trappers with their Indian wives had built a Catholic church and a village by the Santa Fe trace. In the woods through which Martin had come for the past several days, birds prevailed and there were Indians on small, shaggy ponies, Delaware in calico frocks or skin leggings and Pawnee wrapped in blankets. The Kansa women wore leather skirts and the men shaved their heads except for a row in the middle and they painted their faces red, which reminded Martin of the woman he had met by the wigwam who had pointed the way to the bear’s winter cave. Martin therefore liked the Kansa and rode with them whenever they had a pony to spare. They were bound for the town that had their tribal name and when they arrived he asked someone to hire him to haul a load of wood in order to earn a meal because money is not much thought of in a city founded on the barter of skins although on every corner people were holding meetings. There was to be an election in two weeks.

  From this point forward there would be nothing of shape or substance. Sky has no shape. He had come to the end of the trees. Such is the way of nature where it leans against prairie and Martin crept down the street in a foolish daze. He thought of his bear sleeping the sleep of winter dreams and missed her with all his might.

  During a quick dinner on the open street, he experienced a genuine, everyday miracle of the frontier. It was the sight of a laughing rider wearing buckskin with rows of long fringes on his jacket. He was mounted on a big gray horse and leading another horse, pure white. A single-bore rifle lay across the pommel of his saddle and he was shouting, hallooing, lifting himself up in the saddle so as to be seen, leading the white horse by a rope, calling to a small man who was leaning over a painted cart shouting back in French. The painted cart had been brought down from a market in Montreal, although Martin had no way of knowing that yet, any more than he could know that inside the cart were provisions for a journey across the Kansas River that Patton and the Frenchman were about to make. Patton lifted his hat like a rebel and shouted again when he laid eyes on Martin, who was eating a piece of grilled chicken on the noisy, clotted street. He swung his right leg over the saddle and ran straight to his little brother, and they danced and yelped and beat each other on arms and backs.

  Where are they, boy? What have you done with the ancestors?

  Left em, Martin said, bursting into tears.

  Where’s your bear?

  Martin swallowed. Waiting to be born again, he said. Having come four hundred miles riding in a stranger’s wagon or on an Indian pony, he wiped the tears off his face with the heel of his hand and shrugged and laughed and the brothers went into a tavern where Patton bought Martin his first glass of whiskey, one to grow on, he said to celebrate Martin’s fourteenth birthday, and he promised that they were soon going to find the family. Patton was gleeful and Martin tried not to cry again. He swayed on his feet and Patton put him into a chair. I’ve been up to St. Jo twice already, he said, so I’d know if they got there yet, wouldn’t I?

  Martin got up on the big white horse although he was unsteady because of the whiskey, men slapping at him and nearly knocking him out of the saddle because Patton and his French friend were bound for a trading post in a day or two and this c
oming adventure should be acknowledged even before the fact of it. Patton had plenty to sell, even the big white horse. It was the latest venture by a brother who was bragging now as if the finding of Martin had been a laid-out plan.

  As Martin nodded and tried to cling to the horse with his knees, Patton led him alongside the Frenchman and the cart on a short circle of the town in order to publicize Martin’s adventure, which was more exceptional than anything either of the older men had accomplished. Then they rode off to the banks of the Kansas River at the French Bottoms, where a woman sat on the porch of a log house smoking a calumet pipe. Martin forced his eyes to stay open for a few minutes while Patton explained things and then he fell off the horse and someone carried him into the house and laid him down. Later, much later, Patton pulled him to his feet and walked him outside and Martin tried to open his eyes again. What he saw was a girl with a handful of crumbs and she threw them at some turkey birds and then came over to Martin. When Martin went back to the house, the girl and the turkeys followed him in. Patton said that the pipe-smoking woman was the mother of his French friend, and the turkey girl was his sister. The mother had desired to see her son before he made the trip to anyplace on the Kansas side of the river, where anything might happen. In this way Martin discerned that the cart man was made of two kinds of people. He was made of a Native mother and a French father, who was named Grandlouis, and who was telling Patton about the sinking of a boat named Arabia, which might esplain, he said, the disappeerin Dickesonne if they was on eet but none dead all save, he said, but for a mule as the sinking was just over there and we heerd it neigh. He pointed. Mos was pick up by the Jame Lu Cass an we gotta fine where it wen to mebe taken your famille.