Walk by Faith

by Rosanne Bittner

  Dawson rose, kicking at rocks as he walked to where Lena and Carolyn lay under a lean-to. Clare and Sophie were in his tent sick—so sick. How would he tell Clare that Carolyn and Lena had died? Worse, what if Michael died, too? Fighting more tears that made it hard to see, he picked up the two bodies one by one and carried them to the grave, placing Carolyn in first, then Lena. He wanted to scream curses to God Himself, yet the things Michael had taught him over these past weeks and the things he’d just told him swirled in his mind in a myriad of confusion and sorrow.

  “Please…pray over them,” Michael asked.

  “Michael, I can’t—”

  “Pray over them,” the man pleaded again. “I’m…too weak.”

  Feeling completely inadequate, Dawson dropped to his knees. “God, if You will—” His voice choked and he stopped to clear his throat and swallow so he could go on. “If You will accept these words from a man who denied You most of his life, and for the sake of these good, Christian people, I pray for their souls that they are already walking up to Your throne happy and well.”

  He didn’t know what else to say. Michael began reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm, and having gone over it with Michael many times, Dawson spoke it with him from memory.

  “‘Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever,’” they finished.

  Michael keeled over. Dawson got up and rushed around to his side, and when he touched Michael’s shoulder, the man fell over sideways. Dawson did not have to feel for a pulse to know he was dead, but he did so anyway. Confirming his guess, he sat down beside Michael, thinking how a better man had never walked, and wondering why God took Michael instead of him. It just didn’t make sense.

  “Why? Why?” he muttered. “I needed his guidance, Lord.” How strange that although Michael was only a couple of years older than he, Dawson had looked to the man almost as a father figure. How strange that a grown man could sit and cry over another grown man. He hardly recognized himself as the same man who’d left St. Louis so wracked with hatred and anger and with so much prejudice against preachers in general.

  Sorrow so consumed him that he ached all over as he got up and retrieved a blanket to wrap around Michael. He grimaced as he picked the man up in his arms and managed to stoop down and drop him as gently as possible into the grave. He jumped down inside, feeling mad with the horror of his task. He couldn’t bear for Michael to be on top of Carolyn and Lena, so he struggled in the small enclosure to rearrange the bodies so that little Lena was on top.

  “God, why are You doing this to me?” he repeated as he sobbed. What would it be like if he had to do this with Clare and Sophie? He’d have to shoot himself and fall into the grave with them. What use would there be in going on?

  Taking a deep breath he climbed back out of the grave, gritty and sweaty, looking up then to see Clare standing there with horror on her face—a face already looking much thinner and more gaunt after just two days of this hideous sickness that no God should allow to exist. She met his eyes.

  “Which one?” she asked in a pitifully small voice.

  He walked over and pulled her into his arms. “All three,” he answered.

  “No!” she sobbed, withering against him.

  Chapter Thirty

  July 21, 1863

  Clarissa lay on her side watching Dawson hold a sleeping Sophie. At last the vomiting and diarrhea had stopped for both of them, but poor little Sophie lay like a rag doll, and Clarissa felt the same way. After seeing the hole dug for Michael, Carolyn and Lena, she’d collapsed and Dawson had had to carry her back to the tent. With the symptoms finally diminishing, it seemed she and Sophie would live, but all her joy and excitement at going to Montana was gone.

  “How will I explain to Sophie why Lena isn’t here anymore?” she asked Dawson, finding barely enough strength to talk.

  Dawson sighed as he leaned against his saddle. “We’ll tell her God came for her and her parents because He had something important for them to do.”

  “She’ll ask why God didn’t come for her, too.”

  “Tell her God knew you’d be too lonely without her.”

  Clarissa closed her eyes and rolled onto her back. “I don’t know what to do. I feel so lost. Michael and Carolyn’s friendship gave me such strength and joy.”

  “I’d like to think I can give you those things now. You certainly give me those things.”

  “Not over the past few days I haven’t. I guess if I wondered if you’d still care about me after seeing me at my worst, I don’t have to wonder anymore. I don’t know how you made it through the horror of the last few days. I can hardly believe you didn’t get sick just from seeing us so sick.” She put a hand over her eyes. “It’s still so embarrassing.”

  “A person can’t help being sick. And I remember how it felt, which helped me understand what you needed.”

  She stared at the top of the tent, tears trickling down the sides of her face at the reality that Michael and Carolyn were gone. “I feel like I’m living a very bad dream,” she said, her voice choking.

  “I know.” Dawson grabbed a small towel and handed it to her to wipe away her tears. She wondered at how despicable she must look by now. “I’ll get back on my feet as soon as I can. I hope I haven’t held things up so long that we can’t make it to Montana before snow sets in.”

  Gently Dawson laid Sophie onto a quilt and covered her. He moved to Clarissa’s side, bending his legs and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I’m glad you’re still talking about going on to Montana.”

  Their gazes held, and it hit her that this was it. She was left with Dawson Clements to get her to Montana…and then what? “Where else would I go now? I can’t turn back, and I have land in Montana.”

  “We have land.”

  She frowned. “We?” Immediately she thought of how Chad had stolen her store out from under her.

  Dawson grinned and shook his head. “No, I don’t intend to take over your land if you decide you don’t want to share it as husband and wife. But you should know that before he died, Michael told me about a little metal box in his wagon in which he wrote down that if he didn’t survive this trip, his land and Carolyn’s was to go to me. So, Mrs. Clements, you and I are neighbors, if nothing more. Would you like to come over for dinner once in a while?”

  She couldn’t help a smile, realizing he was trying to ease the pain in her heart. “I might consider that.”

  “Do you promise not to put a fence up between us?”

  What a good man he was. A lot of men would not have put up with what he’d gone through the past few days, certainly not Chad, who seemed so weak and cowardly compared to Dawson Clements. “I promise,” she answered, “but I might keep my door locked.”

  He frowned. “That’s not very neighborly. My door will be unlocked at all times. You can walk into my home any time you feel like it.”

  She reached up her hand, and he took hold of it. “I have a lot of thinking to do, Dawson. You have to admit I’m in an odd and somewhat frightening situation here. You’re all I have, and you consider yourself my husband.”

  He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “And you don’t?”

  She studied his big, sturdy hand. “I guess I do. I mean, nothing has been legally filed at a courthouse, and after all, we spoke vows mainly to keep others from talking. Now it doesn’t much matter, I guess. It’s just you and me. Who’s to care?”

  He lifted her hand and kissed it. “I care. I hoped you would, too.”

  She studied those blue eyes that moved her in strange ways. “I do care. It’s just that right now I feel a little—I don’t know—lost, I guess. I feel like I’ve been running from something this whole time, and I feel like I left a different person back in St. Louis. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I ever even lived there and ran a store and went to church and got married and had a little girl and was so happy—once. When your whole life blows up in front of you,
you’re left wondering who you are, why on earth you were even put on the planet.”

  He smiled sadly. “I’ve asked myself those things just about every day since I was eight years old.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry. When I think about how you’ve lived, I feel guilty complaining about anything. But a part of me still sees you as a near stranger. I need to learn to trust you in every way, especially now that it’s just the two of us.”

  He studied her eyes. “I didn’t nurse you and Sophie and clean up after you and keep you alive just so I could abuse you or abandon you when you got well. I did it because I love you, Clare. And a man doesn’t hurt the one he loves. He cherishes her, in sickness and in health, I believe I vowed. I meant all of it, and if you only spoke those vows to make things look good, I understand. I knew that when I asked you to marry me. I’m just praying you’ll realize you meant them all along and didn’t even recognize it.”

  “I never said I didn’t mean at least some of those vows. I guess the proud, distrusting, hurt side of me just doesn’t want anyone to think I turned to you because I was a lonely woman in desperate need of a man.”

  He reached out and smoothed back her damp hair. “Well, put away the thought, because I’m the one who needs you, Clare. I’m the needy one. I’m a man who can’t get along without the woman he’s fallen in love with, the woman who changed his life and made him laugh and gave him purpose and whose dear friends helped me find faith in God again, although I’m not real happy with Him right now after digging that fresh grave out there. The only thing that keeps me from hating God this time is Michael himself. His words keep marching through my mind. He told me God wanted it this way, that he knew in his heart why God brought him out here and he’d done what needed doing. He said God meant for you and me to end up relying only on each other. I’m thinking maybe he was right.”

  “Maybe so,” she said softly. “Oh, Dawson, I’ll miss them so.” The tears came again. “I’ll miss Michael’s Bible readings and the way he had of saying just the right things to people. He was truly a man of God.”

  He still studied her hand. “I guess we’ll have to start reading the Bible to each other.”

  How he’d changed. God truly did work miracles. Now she needed a miracle for herself—the miracle of being able to forgive and forget and go on with life, the wisdom to decide what was truly in her heart. “You can help me learn to trust you by doing something right now, Dawson,” she said, jerking in a sob.

  “What’s that?”

  “It sure would feel good if you just…held me for a while. I’m so scared—of everything—and I really, really hate admitting that, but right now I’m just so worn-out and I miss my friends so much.”

  He smiled warmly, reaching over and pulling her into his arms and onto his lap, leaning against the saddle and letting her settle against his shoulder. “How’s that?”

  “Good. That’s good. But I must smell awful.”

  He closed his eyes. “You smell wonderful.”

  The Lord saved me from death;

  He stopped my tears and kept me from defeat.

  And so I walked in the presence of the Lord

  In the world of the living.

  I kept on believing, even when I said,

  “I am completely crushed.”

  Even when I was afraid and said,

  “No one can be trusted.”

  —Psalms 116:8-11

  Chapter Thirty-One

  July 26, 1863

  Dawson found a small waterfall just a few yards ahead of where they’d left the wagons, and there in the pure, fresh water, Clarissa washed herself and washed Sophie, including their hair. For safety, Dawson stood not far away with his back to them, and not once did he even turn his head slightly.

  Sophie screamed and laughed at how cold the water was, and the sound of her voice and laughter was music to Clarissa’s ears. Her little girl, although skin and bones, was alive, and with no small thanks to Dawson.

  She still found it hard to believe that her two best friends and their dear little girl were lying in the ground, that she could never talk with them again, laugh with them again. They would never realize their plans of settling together, and Michael would never build his church. All the important people in her life were gone. Her parents, Chad, and now the only people who’d stood by her in her darkest times. Every time she thought of it, it hit her like a wave of despair and disbelief.

  She rinsed her hair, allowing herself the luxury of reveling in being clean and well. She helped Sophie do the same, and the girl screamed again from the cold water. Clarissa then wrapped herself in a blanket and put one around Sophie.

  “You can come and get her now,” she called to Dawson.

  Dawson turned and climbed up to the ledge where they stood, putting Sophie’s blanket around her wet hair. “You look like a little Indian girl all wrapped up like this,” he teased. She laughed as he lifted her in his arms and carried her below. He came back for the blankets the two of them had worn around themselves when coming here.

  “I’ll burn these with everything else,” he told Clarissa, looking her over lovingly.

  “Let’s get back to camp. I’m freezing,” she told him, clutching her blanket tighter around her.

  “I can think of a few ways to warm you up, Mrs. Clements.”

  She rolled her eyes and darted past him.

  “You look beautiful that way, Clare, with your hair wet and hanging long,” he called out to her.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she yelled back.

  She heard him laugh, that wonderful laugh that she’d learned to love. They’d reached the point where they could tease each other about their odd situation, and Dawson did not fail to hint that he’d like their union to be complete.

  The three of them walked back to the wagons, where Clarissa and Sophie dressed while Dawson threw blankets and utensils into his tent and poured lamp oil on top of everything. When Clarissa came out of the wagon, the tent and its contents were burning, a black cloud of smoke from the oil rising into the brilliant blue sky.

  “Mommy, what’s he doing?”

  “Dawson has to burn everything, Sophie, so people who come by after us don’t get sick like we did.”

  Sophie watched with pursed lips. “Is Lena coming back soon?” she asked.

  Clarissa closed her eyes against the pain. “No, sweetie. God wants to keep her.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he must have something special for her to do. Maybe she’s up there in the sky watching over you.”

  “Why can’t she come back down here and play with me?”

  “It’s too far to come.”

  She looked up at Clarissa with a pout. “I don’t like God. He took Lena away, and the chickens, too, and Wuthie!”

  Clarissa knelt in front of her. “He took Carolyn and Michael, too, but I still like Him, Sophie. Everything God does is for someone’s good. He has a plan for all of us, and we have to trust Him to do what’s best.” She wasn’t so sure she could do that herself, but telling Sophie helped her with her own doubts and fears. “Just remember that Lena and her mommy and daddy and Ruth are in a wonderful place where they are happy and with Jesus. Someday we’ll go there, too, and we’ll all be together again.”

  Sophie looked up the mountain beneath which they were camped. “Maybe Lena is up on top of the mountain.”

  Clarissa pulled her close. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe I could climb up thew and see hewa.”

  “No, Sophie. It’s too high. Only God and those He comes and gets can live up there.” She rose and took Sophie’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go see Dawson. When we come back I’ll braid your hair.” She ran her hands through her own still-wet hair, thinking about Dawson’s remark and secretly feeling as beautiful as he’d said she was.

  She walked with Sophie to the clearing where they’d spent the past several horrible days. The tent and its contents were now totally engulfed in flames, and Dawso
n stood over by the grave he’d worked relentlessly to dig deep enough out of the hard, rocky ground so that Carolyn and Michael and Lena could rest in peace and not be disturbed by wolves. Dawson was piling more rocks on the grave, and at the head of it was a piece of wagon wood on which Dawson had carved the names of the dead, followed by the date of their deaths and the words “Good Christian People, Now With God.”

  He turned to watch her walk up to him, and he picked up Sophie. “It’s hard to leave them, even though they’re dead,” he said sadly.

  Clarissa’s eyes teared. “Leaving this grave behind will be just about the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I can only thank God that I’m not leaving my little Sophie behind.”

  Dawson sighed deeply, putting an arm around her shoulders and leading her away. “Let’s get ourselves to Montana, Mrs. Clements. We still have a long way to go, a lot of it through mountains. It’s a fact we’ll not catch up to Zeb and the others, unless they’ve had a catastrophe of their own.”

  They were on their own in rugged country, yet Clarissa was unafraid. She had Dawson to protect her, and it was a good feeling.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  August 2, 1863

  They struggled through mountain passes and along foothills, heading north through Wyoming and the Bighorn Mountains, following the route of their own wagon train ahead of them. Clarissa thanked God they did not come across signs that others had come down with the dreaded cholera, something she would not wish on her worst enemy.

  The first few days they did not make much progress. Clarissa was still not strong enough to put in a full day of walking, especially in the higher elevations where oxygen was thinner and where it took more strength to climb.

  Since they were down to two adults, they could only take two wagons. They’d loaded every extra practical item they could from Michael’s wagon and then left it behind, another painful move.