The Passionate and the Proud

by Vanessa Royall

  August proved more terrible than July. Emmalee believed that she would never be cool again. Day by day, week after week, the wagon train rolled on, dreaming of Colorado, of icy mountain springs and wind in the high Rockies.

  After each day on the trail, while his people made camp, Horace Torquist found the best vantage point in the area, climbed to the top of knoll or hill or promontory, and scanned the horizon. Always he descended in elation, the intensity of which increased as the wagon train neared Denver. Not once did he see any sign of Burt Pennington’s wagons, nor the great cloud of dust they raised. To the wagonleader it meant that Pennington had held to a northern route, longer and less traveled, and that he therefore must have fallen far behind.

  So when the Torquist company rolled into Denver on August 20, 1868—with plenty of time to re-outfit and all of September to cross the looming Rockies—the wagonmaster and his weary followers looking forward to celebrating their arrival were shocked and crestfallen to find their rancher rivals already encamped, prepared to break camp; in fact, sassy, rested, and ready to roll.

  The arrival or departure of any big group of pioneers was always an event. Residents of Denver and members of wagon trains already camped there for re-outfitting and recuperation gathered around the Torquist people as they stumbled disconsolately onto the flats east of the city. Emmalee, riding with the Creels, immediately saw Burt Pennington, Lottie, and Otis, the savvy scout. Pennington’s bald pate was brown as a nut from the sun; Lottie looked cool and elegant in a long pink dress with matching pink, patent-leather pumps; Otis wore a sidearm, high boots, and a belt of cartridges buckled around his hard belly. He was chewing on a weed.

  “Hey, Torquist!” Otis goaded the leader of the farmers. “You boys might as well turn around and go back to Missouri. Ain’t too many supplies left here for you.”

  “It’ll be impossible for you to reach Olympia by the first of October for the start of the land rush,” Pennington added cheerfully. “Just as well too. The land beyond the mountains is meant to graze longhorns, not to plow up for wheat and corn.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Torquist, smiling without spirit. “The only question I have is: If there aren’t adequate animals and supplies to re-outfit here, how did you do it?”

  “Just one of them there lucky breaks,” Otis gloated.

  “Yep,” said Pennington. “We had to swing north to avoid them Indians. As luck would have it, we passed through Fort Morgan on our way here to Denver. They had all kinds of horses and oxen and mules. We could cross the Rockies five times with the grub and gear we got.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Torquist said, trying to keep up a good front.

  Lottie flashed Emmalee a dazzling smile as the wagon on which Emmalee was riding rolled by. “Seems I remember that dress from St. Joe!” she called bitchily.

  “Who in the hell was that?” asked Ebenezer Creel in a snarling wheeze. He was riding next to Emmalee on the wagon seat.

  “Pennington’s daughter.”

  “Huh!” pronounced Ebenezer, taking another look at the spiteful Lottie. “I can tell she ain’t never had to work a day in her life. Don’t you pay no never-mind to her, Emmalee. You’re a whole lot tougher than she is. Although I think you still ought to tie up with a good man who’ll protect you from yuhself. Anyway, when it comes to hard times across the Rockies, I’d bet you against prissy Miss Pennington any day!”

  Ebenezer was just trying to be nice, Emmalee realized. He was hoping to cheer her up. Ever since the morning at Smoky Hill River, when she’d thrown the whole train in jeopardy by disobeying orders and hiding in the Conestoga, Emmalee had been the butt of jokes, “the girl who almost ruined things for everyone.”

  “Hey, Em!” Myrtle Higgins had attempted to console her. “You didn’t try to do anything but find out what them damn men was up to. That was my idea too. The only difference is that you got caught.”

  Quite a difference.

  Since that morning, Emmalee’s wounded pride wouldn’t permit her to face Garn. Ebenezer had let drop, now and again, that Garn was “comin’ over to the wagon for a little snort,” but Emmalee always found an excuse to be elsewhere when he appeared. She was sure he would gloat about having saved her from the chief, tell her how comical she’d looked upside-down on the Indian’s horse.

  “That scout ast after you,” Ebenezer always said. “I reckon he thinks yer avoidin’ him.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” Emmalee replied ruefully. The trouble with pride was that it was pretty hard to live with after you’d gone and done something really stupid.

  Randy Clay had come around too, and he was more than sweet. He told her that what had happened out there on the prairie hadn’t mattered. “What matters is the future,” he assured her fervently. And he was right. But then he proceeded to speak of the adjacent tracts of land that he and Emmalee would claim, and how someday…

  Emmalee listened to him, appreciating his ambition and liking him immensely.

  “Let’s wait and see what it’s like when we get to Olympia,” she would say. Which was good enough for Randy.

  “You an’ me, Em,” he’d say, in his manner that was at once totally direct and appealingly modest, “I just think good things’re gonna happen to the two of us. I just feel it in my bones.”

  “I think so too,” Emmalee always told him, but still she had the dream of her land, her home, her life. After she gained those things, gained them on her own, then she might turn her attention to other matters. Why did she feel this way? Emmalee had sometimes asked herself that very question. The answer was complicated, comprised partly of her God-given independence of spirit, partly of the trials she’d had to endure after her parents died, and partly of a compelling memory. She recalled, as vividly as if it were yesterday, the morning she and her father and mother had piled their worldly goods onto the wagon and driven away from their little farm in the Pennsylvania hills. They were caught up in a sense of adventure, Destiny sang in their hearts, yet when Emmalee had looked back for the last time at the small, square white house and the big red barn, when she thought of herself at play beneath the lilacs or hiking up along the Appalachian ridges, she believed in her soul that somewhere on the far side of America there waited a place as dear and sweet as that one had been.

  Her great journey was a trek from home to home. Once a person had her patch of earth, her piece of sky, then there would be time for all the other things.

  “Let’s wait and see what it’s like in Olympia,” she’d told Randy Clay.

  But Olympia was still beyond the Rockies. This was only Denver, a rude frontier town aswarm with all sorts of people bound for points distant, attempting to scratch from each day just enough to tide them over to another dawn. There were cowboys, employed, unemployed, or passing from one place of employment to the next. There were many Chinese, hired to do construction work on the cross-continental railroad. And there were hundreds of pilgrims and pioneers, like Emmalee herself.

  To the west, beyond Denver, loomed the fantastic, implacable Rockies. They rose to the sky; they seemed to hold up the sky, bastions and bulwarks so mighty that the heavens could never fall.

  Emmalee quivered in her soul and stood in awe before those mountains.

  Yet others had crossed them.

  And so would she.

  Since leaving St. Joe, the Torquist farmers had lost all their cattle to the Arapaho. Fifty-six horses had died, along with twenty-nine oxen. Three dogs were dead, seven had run away, and twenty-one of the original 178 Conestogas had broken down irredeemably and been abandoned. The wagon train had come over six hundred miles. Fifteen people had died, and Bernice Creel was failing fast.

  “I just don’t know what we’re gonna do now,” mourned Ebenezer. He had given his poor wife a triple dose of opium, and still she writhed in agony, biting down hard on a piece of wood to keep from screaming.

  The wagon train was bedded down for the night. Last rays of red twilight lanced through purple peaks
and colored the camping plain with the brilliant hues of roses and blood. Emmalee stood beside Ebenezer in the cramped Conestoga, looking down at his wife, powerless to alleviate her agony.

  “I’ll go into town and find a doctor,” she said. “He’ll be able to do something.”

  “Oh, God, I hope so,” said Ebenezer.

  “No.” Bernice Creel groaned. She took the piece of wood from her mouth, scarred with the indentations of her ancient teeth. “Carry me outside,” she said. “I want to see the mountains.”

  “Awww, honey,” said Ebenezer.

  “We’ve come all this way and I want to see the Rockies, at least.”

  “You got a right,” said Ebenezer.

  He and Emmalee unhitched the hammock from its moorings and carried Bernice out through the canvas flaps of the Conestoga, laying her down gently on the endgate. Her body was incredibly thin and wasted; she couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. But her eyes were still alive, her mind still clear, and when she turned to look at the mountains, at the last rays of sunlight shining through the purple peaks, the old woman let out a faint cry of wonder and, yes, happiness.

  “I have come this far, after all,” she said. “Ebenezer, you go on. I want you to go on.”

  “What are you talking about?” said the old man gruffly, kneeling down beside her. “We’re both of us crossing over to the other side.”

  “Yes, but in different ways, Eb. I have to cross first and go farther.”

  Emmalee felt a sudden chill in the air, which she attributed to the coming of mountain night. Then she knelt down beside Mrs. Creel, too, and knew differently. She was on the hard wooden planks of a wagon, but her knees were in the sod beside the Monongahela, in the earth of Springfield, Illinois. All over camp, people were talking and working and living, but an invisibile canopy of death was descending upon the Creels’ wagon.

  “You’ve been a good man to me, Ebenezer…” Mrs. Creel was saying.

  The old man knew what was about to happen, but he did not admit it. “I did my best,” he said, taking her hand, “but don’t talk like this. You’ll only get yourself into a state. We don’t want this kind of talk.”

  “Ebenezer!” exclaimed Mrs. Creel, in a gasp that was like a shout, a cry for help. A paroxysm shook her, as if her body had been seized and shaken by a gigantic hand.

  “Bernice!” the old man wailed. “Hang on, Bernice, we’ll get you some medicine.”

  But it was too late for medicine, it was too late for anything. Bernice died with her face to the mountains; the great blue peaks were reflected eternally in her gaze.

  Later, as Ebenezer in his hammock slept the sleep of the abandoned and bereft, with the sound of coffin nails reverberating throughout the camp, Emmalee and Myrtle Higgins washed Bernice’s body. Looking down sadly upon this withered husk that had once been a woman, Emmalee began to cry.

  “I know,” said Myrtle. “Here you took care of her all this time, brought her all this way…”

  “It’s not only that. I was thinking of everybody. We’re all young once, but time passes so quickly. And this is how everything ends.”

  “No news in that, honey. You’ll pardon me for being blunt. I don’t talk no other way. Sure it ends like this. What matters is how you handle the time you got.”

  “Ebenezer’s all alone now.”

  “So that’s what’s on your mind? Being alone?”

  “Not really, I—”

  “You can lie to yourself, honey, but don’t lie to me. Everybody’s alone in death. But in life nobody is, unless they want to be. Remember what I told you about choices? Life is your time to make choices. After that, it’s too late.”

  They finished their task, sponging the body that had once cradled youth and dreams, love and lust and desire, all gone now. Emmalee found Mrs. Creel’s dresses, picked the one that looked best, and put it on the body. The garment was too large for the shrunken woman. Myrtle used pins to give the dress an appearance of proper fit. Then she drew herself a cup of whiskey from Ebenezer’s barrel, splashed about an inch of it into a second cup, and motioned Emmalee to follow her.

  They sat down in the dirt alongside one of the Conestoga’s big wooden-spoked wheels. Myrtle drank and grimaced. Emmalee sipped and coughed.

  “Have some more,” Myrtle said. “Just what the doctor ordered, believe me.”

  Emmalee’s second sip went down more smoothly. Across camp, the hammering stopped.

  “Carpenter’ll be bringin’ over the coffin in a minute. Funeral in the mornin’. Ain’t nobody got much time to grieve. How you feelin’ now?”

  “Better.”

  Myrtle drank, smacked her lips, cleared her throat.

  “I understand that Randy Clay’s thinkin’ of marryin’ you?”

  “Well, he’s…he’s been talking about getting land together.”

  Myrtle’s laugh was a snort. “I don’t see much difference, do you? Hey, honey, you should give it some real serious thought. Choices, remember. Chance for a good man like that don’t come along every day. Bet I know what’s really on your mind though.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Garn Landar. You’re just plumb flatout buffaloed by him now.”

  “I am not!”

  “Like I said, don’t lie to me. First you think he’s some sort of a rake, could charm the snakes down outta trees. A gorgeous, reckless ne’er-do-well, and a man to stay away from. Then, when we all get ourselves in a big mess, way out beyond the high-water mark with them Indians, he ups an’ saves our arses. And while he is savin’ our hides, you go an’ figure out a way to make a fool of yourself, an’ to almost foul up the deal Landar is cuttin’ with big chief Fire-On-The-Moon.”

  Emmalee said nothing. Myrtle was too close to the truth. She was, in fact, right on the truth.

  “Why, honey, I bet you haven’t even gone over and thanked Garn Landar for saving you. That chief is still ridin’ his white horse ’stead o’ you because of Garn, you know that?”

  That, Emmalee had to admit, was also true. But how was she to thank Garn for what he’d done? He was the one who’d told her that he would do something to make her regard him in a respectful light. And he had. But her own ignominy was so intricately bound up with what he’d done that she was hesitant to face what she was certain would be his sardonic reception of her thanks. She had been the one posturing as an individual of maturity and common sense. Yet she’d been the one who’d hidden in the Conestoga: a reckless act of bad judgment no matter how you looked at it.

  It was dark now, except for the light from a curved scimitar of moon above the foothills. Emmalee saw Myrtle shake her head.

  “Honey, Garn Landar may be all you think him to be, or even worse, but you ought to go thank him for what he did. The man deserves that, anyway. You can do it. You got the stuff. I been watchin’ you. A lot of people been watchin’ you. You ain’t been bellyachin’ about that two-year deal Torquist made you sign, an’ you took right fine care of poor old Bernice.”

  “But everybody thinks I’m an idiot because I almost provoked those Arapaho.”

  “Could of been me.” Myrtle laughed. “Thank Landar first chance you get. You’ll feel better.”

  “I will,” Emmalee promised, remembering the time she’d spent in Garn’s cabin on the Queen of Natchez. She’d thought she had seen the last of him then, with no regrets. She had thought she’d seen the last of him, too, after that intimate night beneath the wagon. But his handling of the Indians, along with relatively discreet behavior on the train, had pretty much set aright the suspicion with which he’d first been regarded, so it looked as if he was here to stay.

  Every time Emmalee thought she might have seen the last of him, he kept popping up again, with a wink and a grin and a smart remark to put her in her place.

  “Emmalee, I swear I’ll cut your tongue out. And how could you live without it?”

  “All right,” she promised Myrtle again, “I’ll thank him when I see him.”

&
nbsp; “Can’t hurt,” replied the older woman, belching. “Yonder comes the coffin now. Best we ditch these whiskey mugs.”

  Carpenter Juneus Peabody, blacksmith Lawrence Redding, and the Buttlesworths, father and son, carried the coffin over to the wagon and set it down on the endgate. Myrtle lit a lantern inside the wagon. She and Emmalee lifted Bernice Creel’s body and laid it gently inside the plain, elongated wooden box for burial in the morning. Ebenezer did not awaken.

  “I’ll stay with him,” Emmalee said. “I promised Mrs. Creel I’d take care of him.”

  When the others had gone, Emmalee put a second blanket over the sleeping Ebenezer. She was just about to blow out the lantern when she caught sight of Creel’s big leather money belt hanging from a hook on one of the Conestoga’s curved wooden ribs. Emmalee excused herself for being only human, yet she could not help but remember Ebenezer’s offer of a hundred dollars for taking care of his wife. She would never have dreamed of taking money that was not offered to her, but she was curious…

  The belt had about fifty slots notched into its thick length. Emmalee ran her hands over its cool, supple leather and removed it from the hook. Glancing at Creel to make sure he was still asleep, she carried the belt beneath lantern light and slipped a finger into one of the slots, touching crinkly paper.

  She thrust her fingers into a second slot.

  More paper, crisp and rustling. Like money.

  She checked three more notches and felt paper in every slot.

  Emmalee’s heart was beating fast. If there was a hundred-dollar bill in each of the slots she’d assayed, it was enough to buy her out of bondage to Horace Torquist!

  Ebenezer’s hammock swayed slightly as he shifted position. Emmalee started and hid the belt behind her. But the old man slept on. Carefully then, she grasped a corner of one of the bills and withdrew it slowly. The numeral “1” revealed itself. She drew the bill out a little farther. A “0” showed itself in the lantern light and a second “0” followed. Another small tug and a third “0” dazzled Emmalee’s eyes. She yanked the bill all the way out of the slot. It was a one-thousand-dollar note!