She blushed, and actually swiped a hand across her pretty face as if batting at a gnat. “I swear, you are a flattering man, Mr. Moss.”
“Joe.”
“Oh, yes, Joe. Well,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Let’s not talk about that anymore.”
“Just one last question.” Joe had to know. “Mrs. Johnson, if you continue to refuse to marry Mr. Purvis, what will happen?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “These are good people. Blessed people who care about one another. But now that I have gone against the wishes of the elders, I am not one of them in spirit anymore.”
“But you would be if you married Mr. Purvis?”
“Oh yes! I would be . . . hmmm . . . how can I say this? I would be redeemed and held in high regard again.”
“Do they taunt or mistreat you?” he asked.
“No! Of course not. It’s just that my life is now rather . . . lonesome and quiet. I have much to do here. Too much, really. But I am grateful for that because when you are very busy and tired, you don’t think so much about the past or the future.” She stood and laced her fingers together. “Now, can we talk about giving you a bath?”
The question caught Joe completely off guard. He didn’t know what to say because he was so flabbergasted.
“Mr. Moss. Joe,” she said when his discomfort only heightened. “You haven’t had time to look, but you are completely undressed under that cover. I had no choice but to bandage and clean your wounds, which are many and serious. I’m afraid that your hip appears to be broken. Also a foot that is only now starting to heal and which I think was crushed. I thought that your left arm was broken as well, but now that the swelling has gone down, I don’t think so.”
“I am in some pain,” he confessed. “And I haven’t yet tried to move.”
“I wouldn’t move if I were you for a few more weeks.”
“More weeks!” Joe gulped. “How long have I been here?”
“Five weeks.”
He groaned. “And I’m still . . . .”
“You are still very much in need of time and rest. If you try to move now, you may damage yourself and undo what healing has begun.”
“But I can’t stay here.”
“I don’t see why not. The tongues have been wagging since I found you, and they won’t stop until long, long after you leave.”
“Ma’am, I sure am sorry.”
She lifted her chin. “I have prayed every night and every day about this and I believe you are my salvation.”
“Huh?”
“Salvation,” she repeated. “Did you ever hear of Rachel in the Holy Bible?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, if you had you would understand. Don’t you read the Bible, Joe?”
“I don’t read. Period.”
“How sad. Maybe I can teach you before you leave.”
Joe didn’t know what to say.
“Now, about that bath. You are, Joe, smelling rather ripe.”
He blushed. “And that ain’t good.”
“No,” she answered with a smile. “That ain’t good.”
“Could I do it on my own?”
“You can try.”
“Then try I will if you will give me a basin of water and soap.”
She placed her hands on her hips and nodded. “Good. You are not a lazy or fearful man, Joe.”
“Mrs. Johnson, the truth is that I’ve never been much afraid of anything.”
“Except the Lord.”
Joe didn’t want to tell her that he didn’t spend a minute a month fearing the Lord, but he decided that would not be to good purpose, so he said nothing and, after a few moments, she turned with a shake of her head and went to heat his bathwater.
5
IF IT HADN’T been for him wanting so bad to find his sweet Fiona, Joe Moss would have greatly enjoyed his slow convalescence in the little shed out in back of Mrs. Ellen Johnson’s farmhouse. The truth of the matter was that Mrs. Johnson was a wonderful cook and she would read him stories . . . but only on the condition that he at least learn the alphabet, then read and write a few simple words. After all, she explained, and like it or not, he was going to be convalescing for at least two more months.
“I’ve never been one for much schoolin’, Mrs. Johnson,” he told her, on his way to making an excuse not to learn reading. “My pappy and mammy couldn’t read nor write and they figured it was just a waste of time.”
“Nothing against your parents, Joe, but they were wrong. A person who is literate has the key to a world of knowledge and wisdom passed down from others who came before him.”
“Mostly, what I learned was passed down in stories told down through the generations,” he replied. “Simple word of mouth, like the Indians have used for longer than the white man has been here bossin’ him around.”
“Yes, I understand the importance of oral history and learning,” she said with great patience. “However, there are many things that you can learn from people that you will never know because they either lived in another time or in a distant and interesting place.”
Joe puzzled over this for a few moments, then said, “No disrespect, ma’am, but I can’t see what some fella livin’ in another time or place could teach me that would make my life easier.”
“Oh, but that is not the least bit true!”
She left the room, and returned a few minutes later with an old and yellowed newspaper. Opening it, Ellen Johnson studied the articles for several moments before saying, “Here’s something you might find interesting. It is an article in the San Francisco Times about a man who invented a new rapid-firing and revolutionary weapon.”
“Powder or cartridge?” Joe asked suspiciously.
“I’m sure it’s cartridge, and this says that it was designed by Richard Jordon Gatling, who was given the patent.”
“Never heard of him,” Joe said dismissively. “Is this Gatling feller from east or west of the Mississippi River?”
“I imagine east of the Mississippi,” she replied. “Anyway this gun has six barrels and . . . .”
“Six barrels!” Joe scoffed. “Hellfire . . . oh, excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t see how any man could aim down more’n one barrel.”
“Well, that may be true,” she said, “but this one has six and they revolve around a central axis permitting an extremely high rate of fire.”
“How fast?”
“Over a hundred rounds a minute.”
Joe scoffed. “Ha! How’s any man gonna even pull the trigger so fast, much less hit anything? Why, that weapon is a fool’s dream. Ain’t worth nothin’ to nobody.”
“Perhaps yes and perhaps no,” she said. “But here’s an interesting article on the War Between the States concerning aerial photography.”
“What?”
“Aerial photography,” she repeated. “It says that the Union Army has now used aerial reconnaissance carried out by a balloonist named Thaddeus Lowe, who photographed Confederate ground emplacements around Richmond, Virginia, at an altitude of one thousand feet.”
Joe’s jaw dropped. “A man went up in a balloon a thousand feet so he could photograph Johnny Rebs?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Well, why didn’t they shoot him out of the damned sky?”
“I don’t know.”
“See there?” Joe said, with a triumphant look. “First you tell me about some fella that invented a six-barreled gun that couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. The next minute you read about another fella that was dumb enough to go up in a balloon and get himself shot out of the sky unless he was mighty lucky or the Johnny Rebs were poor shots, which I heard is not often the case.”
Ellen Johnson gently folded the newspaper up and set it aside. “I can see that you are a difficult man to reason with and not likely to change.”
“I’m no child, Mrs. Johnson. I’ve made more than my share of mistakes, but I like to think that I’ve learned a bit from each of
them.”
“And now you’re going up to the Comstock Lode to find Fiona.”
“If she’s still there and will have me, then I’ll take her for my wife.”
Ellen nodded. “Well, I do hope she is there and that you and she get married and live happily ever after.”
“The boy, too,” Joe blurted. “Well, maybe the little jasper is a girl. Still, I’ll take either one and do my best to raise ’em straight and provide for them well.”
She studied him closely, and then asked, “Are you willing to be a deep-rock miner, Joe Moss?”
“Don’t know nothin’ about minin’,” he admitted. “Especially deep-rock. I have panned a little for gold, yet never found a trace. That said, I’ll still do what it takes to feed and provide for Fiona and my child.”
“That’s very admirable,” she answered, smiling, “but I wonder if you have any idea of how awful and dangerous it is to go down in those deep mine shafts and try to dig for gold and silver.”
“Can’t be any more dangerous than when I was trappin’ beaver up in the land of the Blackfoot and they was always after my scalp.”
“I’m sure that is true. But in the mines the dangers are of a very different kind, and I can’t quite imagine a man like you working far down under the earth with a pick and shovel.”
Joe thought about that for a moment and agreed. “I’ll do it if I must. But first I’d sure try hard to find something better. Besides, I might even start my own business.”
“Doing what?”
“I dunno. But I’ve got a wagonload of lumber scattered down your mountainside that I mean to collect. I can either sell that lumber or use it to build some kind of business.”
“Joe, do you remember anything about that mountainside where you went over?”
“Nope. Only that it had to be real steep.”
“That may be an understatement. The mountainside is not only steep, but strewn with boulders, bushes, and even pines. It will take a huge effort to retrieve that lumber . . . perhaps more than you can offer.”
“I’ll get that lumber if I have to carry up every board on foot,” Joe vowed. “Once I’m back on my feet and get my strength, I’ll do it before the first snows of winter.”
“I hope you can,” she told him. “Because everyone agrees that it will be warped and ruined by next spring after lying under deep snow for months. They say that what isn’t broken or splintered is green and needs seasoning.”
“I reckon that is so.”
“Where did you buy it?” Ellen asked. “From a mill up on Lake Tahoe?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Joe felt awful for lying to this good Christian woman, but he thought it was the better thing to do than to admit that he had been forced to kill two freighters and that the lumber was not really his own.
“It must have cost a great deal to buy that much lumber and I certainly hope that you can recover your investment.”
“Oh, I’m sure that I can,” Joe said, wanting to change the subject. “So what else did that newspaper tell you?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear any more, given your reaction to the two articles I read.”
“Maybe I was a mite too quick to judge,” he admitted.
“Well, I’m afraid much of that newspaper was given over to accounts of the great War Between the States,” she said, “which is entirely sad and depressing. But I do have books in the house and I will read a little of them if you are interested.”
“Sure am.”
“But first, let’s go over the alphabet and then the spelling of your name.”
“Oh, ma’am!”
“Joe, please.”
Hell, how could he deny this woman who was his savior anything? “All right, ma’am.”
And so for the next two hours they worked on the alphabet and his name, until Joe started to get the hang of it. Letters were like sticks in a beaver’s dam. Each one, by itself, wasn’t worth nothing. But put together just right, they formed a word. And one word added to another word formed what this widow woman called a sentence. And when you added a bunch of sentences, you had a paragraph, and that all told you something important.
“I appreciate the way you explain things. Once, when I was a boy, a schoolmarm came to our cabin and caught me out in the fields working. She asked if I’d like to go to school and I said I reckoned that I would. But then she talked to my folks, and they both said they reckoned I didn’t need to learn anything from her that they couldn’t teach me themselves.”
“And that was the end of it?”
“Not quite. The schoolmarm seemed to take me on as a special cause, and she kept coming around with books and primers and such. They had pictures and the alphabet. And I snuck ’em into the woods and looked at ’em for quite some time.”
She listened with great interest. “And then what finally happened, Joe?”
“My pappy caught me lookin’ at them books and he skinned my behind with a willow switch till I couldn’t sit down for a week! He put them word books in a feed sack and slung ’em over the cemetery’s fence, and I don’t know what happened to ’em after that. I do know that the very next time he went to town, he looked up that schoolmarm and he musta gave her billy-be-damned because she never came by again. Got married a few years later and went off, but the settlement found another teacher.”
“I was the schoolteacher for Genoa before my husband died, so your story touches my heart,” Ellen said after a long pause during which she seemed to reach back into her past and find pain. “Believe it or not, there are still parents with the same attitude your parents held. And there is nothing as sad as a wasted mind, Joe. Nothing in the world as sad.”
“I reckon not,” he replied, not at all sure of what she was talking about but believing she was right about learning and the mind.
“Can Fiona read and write?” Ellen asked, suddenly changing course.
“Sure can,” Joe answered proudly. “She and her mother used to read the Bible most every night on the wagon train. And her father read from the Good Book when Fiona’s dear mother died on the trail of a fever.”
“That must have been very hard on them both.”
Joe frowned. “It was terrible hard on Fiona. But her father is the kind of man that don’t know what he lost even when it’s gone. He’s a big, braggin’ sort who drinks too damn much . . . not that I haven’t gotten drunk many a time myself and am fit to judge . . . but Mr. McCarthy is the kinda man I’d just like to kill.”
“Joe!” Ellen cried with shock.
He realized at once that he’d upset her. “Only a figure of speech, ma’am.”
She studied him closely for a moment, then said, “There is something I have to ask you. And, frankly, I’m not sure that I want to know the answer.”
He didn’t understand. “If you want the truth, I’ll give ’er to you. If you don’t want the truth, then I’ll figure that out by your expression and I’ll tell you what I think you’d want to hear.”
Joe paused. “That’s about the best I can do for you, Mrs. Johnson.”
“If that is how it would be, then there isn’t really much point of me asking about that bag of human scalps they found on the mountainside and threw away, is there?”
“They tossed my scalps!”
“Yes. Now what I won’t ask you is how they came to be in your possession.”
“Fair enough,” Joe said with relief. He was not about to reveal to her that he’d once killed six Piegan Indians single-handedly and earned the vaunted nickname Man Killer, which he was still called in the north high mountain country.
“But,” she continued, choosing her words with care, “I do have to tell you that those scalps have turned the entire Genoa settlement against you, Joe. They have been the cause of even more gossip than my taking care of you out here in this shed.”
Joe thought about that for a long moment and said, “I realize now that you have gone way out on a limb for me, Mrs. Johnson. Too far out on a limb, I reckon. A
nd I promise you that I will make sure that you are rewarded . . . whether you want to be or not, and that I will leave as soon as is physically possible for me to leave. And finally, I am sorry for the trouble and gossip. I know how it can affect a woman because it hurt Fiona something terrible on our wagon train.”
“Gossip is the Devil’s tongue working overtime. But Joe, I was already an outcast the moment I refused to marry Mr. Purvis. And he still comes around because he is a very persistent man. He vows that he will take none other than me for his next wife.”
“Next? Oh, yeah, I forgot the Mormon men sometimes take a lot of wives. Some Indians do that, too, you know.” Joe grinned. “As for me, I couldn’t handle more than one woman. No offense, ma’am, but they can be a powerful bother and distraction at times.”
Ellen laughed out loud. “Was your beloved Fiona a ‘bother and distraction’?”
Joe saw the trap he’d stepped in, but he was caught and had no choice but to be honest. “I reckon she was a big distraction and my downfall on that wagon train. You see, I was with her the night that Indians came and stole a few of our horses.”
“You were out walking and talking.”
“We were doing a little more’n that,” Joe confessed, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks. “But the long and short of it is that those horse-thievin’ Indians killed poor Tommy Kramer and Fiona’s arm got broken. So that’s why they fired me and found another wagon master.”
“I see.”
“I didn’t argue any about gettin’ fired. I deserved it and I’m ashamed about it. But most of all, I’m ashamed for what I did to Fiona.”
“You mean putting her in a motherly way.”
“Sure, and us not being married.”
Ellen nodded. “I hope that you find her and your child on the Comstock Lode and that everything turns out well for you as a family. But . . . .”
“But what, ma’am?”
“But she might have remarried, Joe. Or is engaged or fallen ill and died. There are many things that could have happened since you saw her. And most likely of all, she may hate you for what she had to go through.”
The Mother Lode Page 4