It was my job to gather the chips. Joey collected them for his family, too. Each morning, we took our sacks and searched the prairie for the dung. The chips were good fuel, but they burned quickly, so we needed to gather all we could find. We looked for dried chips, because they burned better and were lighter weight. Barebones came with us. He thought we were playing and picked up sticks for me to throw to him.
“Let me toss one,” Joey said.
“Sure.” I threw the stick to him, and Joey flung it as far as he could, but Barebones brought it back to me. He knew he was my dog.
“I wish I had a dog,” Joey said. “I had one at home, but Mama wouldn’t let me take him. I bet when we get to Denver, Papa will find a dog for me.”
“You can come and visit us, and I’ll let you play with Barebones.”
“I’d like that.”
We’d hunted for buffalo chips all morning. The sacks were heavy and our hands were dirty with the powdery dust. “We have enough,” I told Joey. Then I spotted a chip that was so dry it was white. “One more,” I said, dragging my sack to where the chip lay on a pile of rocks. I tossed a rock at the dung circle to see the white dust rise. Just as I did, I heard a noise like pebbles rattling in a tin cup. When I looked to see what it was, I spotted a rattlesnake coiled in the rocks, its tail shaking and making a warning sound. The snake raised its head, and its long red tongue flickered back and forth. I looked into its black eyes and froze in place with my arm out toward the buffalo chip.
I knew I should jump back, but I was held by the snake’s stare. I tried to call Joey, tried to tell him to throw a stone at the snake or shake a stick at it to divert its attention. But my voice wouldn’t work.
The snake, its tail shaking furiously, kept its gaze on me as its awful head moved slowly toward my arm. It was as if it knew I couldn’t get away and was playing with me. Then just as it got close enough to strike, I saw a dark shape fly past me and grip the neck of the snake in its teeth. Barebones shook the snake back and forth, back and forth, the rattler flapping and twisting, until at last it was still, and Barebones dropped it into the dirt.
Joey ran over to me. “Barebones saved your life,” he said. He found a stick and poked the rattler, but it didn’t move.
I looked at my arm, still stretched out, and slowly lowered it. Then I hugged Barebones for all I was worth. “You saved my life, you ugly thing,” I said, while Barebones licked my face.
Joey squatted beside the snake. “Pa says you can eat these things. They taste like chicken. You want it?”
“Not me.” I shivered at the idea.
Joey took out a knife, and holding up the end of the snake, he cut off the rattles and handed them to me. “You’d better keep those, in case nobody believes what happened.”
“Who wouldn’t believe me?” I asked. Ma had taught me to tell the truth, so when I said something had happened, Ma and Pa knew it had.
Joey considered that. “Maybe Mr. Bonner.”
I left that last buffalo chip where it was, just in case snakes came in pairs, and Joey and I dragged our sacks back to the wagons.
Before I could tell Ma and Pa what had happened, Joey burst out, “Emmy Blue almost got bit by a rattlesnake, the biggest one you ever saw. Show them the rattles.”
I still had them in my hand, and opened it. Pa picked them up. Uncle Will came up to us then and eyed the rattles, saying, “Look at how many there are. That must have been a very large, very old snake!”
“What happened?” Ma asked. Her face was white, and her hands looked like they were shaking.
She looked so worried that I couldn’t tell her, but Joey spoke up. “The snake was all coiled up and ready to bite her, but Barebones grabbed it in his teeth and shook it to death.”
“If it wasn’t for Barebones, I’d have been bit,” I whispered.
“Hurrah for Barebones!” Joey said.
Ma put one hand on my arm and squeezed. With the other, she gripped the dog’s fur. “You have a stout heart, Barebones,” she said.
At the end of the week, when Ma asked what I would put into the drawer in the medicine chest where I kept my treasures, I handed her the rattles. “I want to save these,” I said, “but these are the only ones I ever hope to get. One rattlesnake out on the prairie is enough for me.”
Chapter Fourteen
POOR JOEY
Lucy Bonner wasn’t the only woman on the wagon train who became our friend. Celia Potts was several wagons behind us, although she and her family often camped next to us. She was a tiny woman with curly red hair, freckles, and eyes the color of a robin’s egg I’d once found. Ma called her looks unusual, and I thought that she might have been the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.
“She blazes like fire,” Aunt Catherine said, and it was true. With her red hair, the colorful dresses she wore, and the way she always seemed to be in motion, Celia Potts did indeed resemble a blaze. She stood out among the drab women in the train.
Of course, there were reasons she was active. There were her three children—Honor, a girl who was three, and Honor’s two brothers, Bert, two, and Ulysses, who was born just before the Potts family started west. We had met Celia when she dashed between Uncle Will’s wagon and ours, Ulysses in her arms, chasing Honor and her brother.
“I’ll hold your baby, Mrs. Potts,” I said now, as she tried to grab Honor and Bert with her free hand. I loved babies, and it was clear to me that there’d never be any more in our family. Agnes Ruth had died more than five years earlier, and Ma hadn’t had any babies since then.
“I’d be obliged,” she said, giving him up and grasping the other two children, one in each hand. “You are to call me Celia. I must be closer to you in age than to your mother. I’m nineteen,” she said, glancing at Ma. She was right. I was almost eleven, while Ma was more than thirty.
I rocked Ulysses in my arms, and he smiled at me and made bubbly sounds. I loved that baby right off. We all adored Celia, too. We cared about her every bit as much as we did Lucy Bonner. Only there was a difference between them. While we disliked Mr. Bonner—Ma wouldn’t let me use the word hate or I’d say I hated him—we loved Mr. Potts.
James Potts, unlike his wife, was big and dark with black hair to his shoulders and eyes the color of soot. And he had a voice that boomed out. I was a little afraid of him at first, but then I realized he was a kind man who loved his children. In the evenings, when most of the men sat and smoked their pipes after they’d finished working with the animals or repairing the wagons, Mr. Potts played with Honor and Bert, and he’d hold Ulysses so that Celia could visit with Ma, Aunt Catherine, and Mrs. Bonner.
Mr. Bonner heard Mr. Potts baby-talk to Ulysses, and he asked in a loud voice, “What kind of man talks with a child like that?”
“Why a man who loves his son,” Mrs. Bonner told him. She didn’t often talk back to Mr. Bonner, and I wondered if he’d be angry with her. We were used to seeing the bruises on her arms and face by then. She would always tell us she was careless, that she bumped into things, but I was sure that wasn’t true. Sometimes we’d hear her crying in the night, and Mr. Bonner would shout, “Be still!” Ma would push back the blankets, but Pa would tell her to stay where she was.
Mr. Potts wasn’t like that. When he grabbed his wife, it was to hug her. “Ain’t she the prettiest thing?” he’d ask us. “Why would such a beauty marry an ugly cuss like me?”
“Because I couldn’t do any better,” she’d reply. “Besides, who else would take you?” Then they’d laugh as if she’d said the cleverest thing they’d ever heard. We’d laugh, too, just because they made us happy.
Ma hadn’t known Celia for more than five minutes before she asked her usual question: “Do you quilt?”
“Oh no. With three little ones, I don’t have time. It’s all I can do to keep up with mending.” She held out her freckled hands. “Besides, these fingers get too confused. They can’t abide a thimble, either, so they’re always getting pricked.” She laughed. “You know tha
t old saying that a woman has to complete thirteen quilt tops before she can get married? Well, I never finished but two, and a poor job I did of them. My friends expected me to be an old maid.”
Aunt Catherine looked down at the quilt square that was rumpled up in my hand. We had been on our morning quilt walk when we stopped to visit with Mrs. Potts. “Did you know that, Emmy Blue? At the rate you’re going, you’ll not marry till you’re fifty!”
“Or maybe never,” I said, and the women laughed.
“Do you embroider, then?” Mrs. Bonner asked Celia.
“I tried that, too, but I dropped the stitches, so I laid it down.”
“I could teach you to quilt,” Ma told her. “If you don’t want to learn now, then come along when you do.”
“It would be a waste of time. I expect I am hopeless.” Celia’s mouth turned down in a pout. But just as quickly she smiled again. “I can paint. I decorated all my china with roses. Let me show you.”
As Celia handed Ulysses to me and climbed into her wagon, Ma whispered, “Paint?” to Aunt Catherine, who shrugged.
Celia backed out of the wagon and jumped to the ground, holding a plate in her hand. The plate was covered with flour because, like our cups, her plates had been stored in her flour barrel. She wiped it on her apron and held it out. Painted on the plate was the most beautiful rose I’d ever seen, so real that I thought the thorn in the stem would prick me if I touched it.
Ma took the plate, holding it as if she was afraid it would break. “Why, I never saw anything so lovely. You are a real artist, Celia. Look, Catherine, there are even tiny dewdrops. If I held it in the sun, would they dry up?”
Aunt Catherine took the plate and examined it. Then she turned it over. “You ought to sign your name on the back. I’ve seen that on fine china.”
Celia looked embarrassed. “I just paint. But I’m glad you like it. I brought my paints with me. Jimmy insisted. He said if he didn’t find a gold mine, I could support us by painting china. I wouldn’t mind that, but I doubt we could live on five cents a day. It’s a good thing I don’t have to earn my living.” She laughed and took back the plate, balancing it carelessly in her hand.
I was holding Ulysses, and as Celia reached for him, he flung out his little arm, knocking the plate from her hand. It bounced on a rock, breaking in half, then landed on the dirt, broken into pieces.”
“Oh my goodness!” Ma said, horrified. There were too many pieces to glue back together—if anyone in the wagon train even had glue. She reached down for the largest piece, which had a rose leaf painted on it. “This one is worth saving.” She brushed off the dirt that was mixed with a little flour and held it out to Celia.
I thought Celia would be heartbroken, but she only laughed. “Keep it if you want it. Now I have an excuse to paint another. It’s what I like to do best.”
After she left, Ma told Aunt Catherine, “I’d have been heartbroken if I’d smashed that plate, but nothing seems to bother her. She might be the happiest woman I’ve ever met.”
“She is that, and talented. Why, I’d hire her to paint a set of china—if I had any china,” Aunt Catherine said.
“Maybe she’ll paint tin plates,” I told her.
After my scare with the rattlesnake, Joey and I were careful when we gathered buffalo chips. We weren’t concerned when the chips were in the dirt, but we knew that snakes like to sun themselves on rocks. So we poked around with sticks before picking up the dung we found in rocky places. It was a good thing, because we saw other rattlers. Barebones barked at them to warn us, but he never attacked the snakes.
“How did he know that first snake was going to bite me?” I asked Pa.
He shrugged. “Sometimes animals are smarter than we are.”
“I don’t think one of the oxen would protect me,” I said.
“I never said an ox was smart,” Pa said, and laughed.
Joey and I were careful even when we weren’t picking up buffalo chips. When we hunted for stones or birds’ eggs or when we lay on the ground to look up at the sky, I kept a watch for snakes.
Joey teased me about it. “I’ll bet the snakes send out smoke signals telling each other to keep away from Bare-bones,” he said. Buttermilk John had told us that Indians communicated by waving blankets over their fires, directing the smoke a certain way.
Barebones might have protected me, but not Joey. One morning, Joey jumped out of the wagon and landed directly on a rattler. Before he even knew he’d stepped on the snake, the rattler sank its fangs into Joey’s leg.
He screamed, screamed so loud that everybody in the camp heard him. The men dropped what they were doing and ran toward the Schmidt wagon. Mr. Potts grabbed an axe attached to the side of his wagon and rushed to my friend. When he reached the snake, Mr. Potts swung at it with the axe, chopping off its head. Ma and Pa and I reached Joey just as Mr. Potts cut the snake in half. Pa picked up Joey, holding him in his arms.
Buttermilk John was right behind us. “Lay him on the ground,” he ordered.
Ma found a quilt from the wagon seat and spread it on the ground for Joey.
The Schmidts, who had been gathering their oxen, didn’t know Joey was the cause of the ruckus. When they reached their wagon and saw him, Mrs. Schmidt let out a scream louder than her son’s.
Mr. Schmidt grabbed her arm and said that Buttermilk John was taking care of Joey. We all watched as Buttermilk John straightened the snake-bit leg. Then he took a sharp knife from his belt.
“Don’t cut off his leg,” Mrs. Schmidt yelled, pulling away from Mr. Schmidt.
Buttermilk John handed the knife to Pa and said, “Cleanse it in the fire.”
Pa went to the Schmidts’ fire and swiped the blade through the flame, then brought it back to where Buttermilk John knelt beside Joey. He had already taken a leather strap and tied it tightly around Joey’s leg, above the spot where the snake had bitten him. He made two slashes above the bite. Then he put his mouth to the cuts and began to suck out blood and spit it onto the ground.
“What’s he doing?” Mrs. Schmidt asked. She looked terrified and had begun to cry.
“He’s sucking out the snake’s venom that’s in Joey’s blood,” Pa explained. “He’s getting rid of all the poison.”
“He won’t lose the leg, will he, my Joey?” Mrs. Schmidt asked. There were tears running down her face. Mr. Schmidt steadied his hand on his wife’s arm, but she flung it off.
“You, Schmidt!” she yelled. “This is your fault. You sacrificed your son so that we can go to that godforsaken place, that Denver. If we’d stayed at home where we belonged, Joey wouldn’t have got bit by the snake.”
Mrs. Bonner walked over to her and touched Mrs. Schmidt’s face. “My dear, we are praying for Joey. Will you join us?” Ma and Aunt Catherine and some of the other women were standing at the back of the Schmidt wagon, their heads bowed.
Mrs. Schmidt seemed startled by the kindness. “I don’t know. You ladies are praying for Joey?”
“Please,” Mrs. Bonner said, leading Mrs. Schmidt to where the women stood.
Mrs. Schmidt didn’t pray. She only stood there and muttered, “That Denver. Why did I ever like strawberry tarts?”
After a while, Buttermilk John said he had sucked out enough blood. He removed the strap from Joey’s leg and stood up. “There’re other things I could do, make a brine of salt and plantain, but I don’t suppose anybody’s got plantain.” He looked down at Joey, then said, “We’ll put him in the wagon. He’ll ride there.”
“We go on?” Mr. Schmidt asked.
Buttermilk John nodded. “We got to keep moving. The boy’ll be out of his mind for a time. It’s a natural thing. Don’t let it cause ye to worry. It was a small snake and they can be meaner than the big ones. Still, this child thinks your boy will make it.”
Some of the men began to move the furniture in the Schmidt wagon to make room for Joey. Ma motioned me to slip away from the women, and together we found blankets and quilts to make a pallet
for my friend. Then the men lifted him into the wagon.
Pa and Uncle Will yoked the Schmidt oxen and chained them together, then attached the chains to the wagon. Mr. Schmidt went to his wife and took her arm. “Mama, Joey’s in the wagon. We have to move on. Buttermilk John says so.”
Mr. Schmidt helped his wife into the wagon, where she climbed in beside Joey. When she was settled, she put her head in her hands and began to cry again. I could hear her all the way back to our wagon.
I walked along beside our oxen, next to Pa. We were silent for a time. Then, trying to keep my voice steady, I asked, “Is Joey going to die, Pa?” I hadn’t wanted to ask, because Pa always told the truth. I didn’t want to give up hope.
Pa flicked the whip against his hand a time or two before he turned to me. “I don’t know the answer, Emmy Blue. Nobody does. Buttermilk John says it depends on whether the snake was angry and injected a large quantity of venom into the bite. The bite would be worse if the snake was hungry, too. It also depends on how Joey’s body fights the poison. Right now, he’s very sick, and when he wakes up, he’ll be in pain. It’ll be two or three days before we know whether he’ll be all right. And if he is, it could be weeks before the pain and swelling go away.”
“But he might be all right,” I said, snatching at Pa’s words. Ma always told me to hope for the best and that was what I was doing now.
Chapter Fifteen
GO-BACKS
The camp was quiet that night, with no singing, no shouting. No one even yelled at the oxen. The children, too, seemed to be quieter than usual.
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