by Steve Frazee
“You ride and hold onto Rock’s mane and I’ll lead him. Can you do that, Kathy?”
Kathy nodded.
Again Eddie had to turn the oxen from their hard-headed desire to go up-river. He got them going again, leading the horse, carrying the heavy rifle, looking back frequently at the pale, sick little figure on the horse. Progress was agonizing. The intervals between Kathy’s cramps and the retching that almost tore her apart grew shorter. Each time she couldn’t stay on the horse.
It was late afternoon when they came to the trail. The hot sun lay in a long swath on the brown hills, rutted where wagons had made the steep descent; but there were no wagons in sight now and when Eddie went over and looked hopefully at the trail he saw wheel marks blown full of sand, as if no one had passed for years.
“It ain’t so far now, Kathy.” Eddie looked at the sun and knew they had no chance to get back to the camp before dark, but they had to keep going; he had to get Kathy to Mrs. Snelling as soon as he could.
He abandoned the oxen. They were no longer important. Some bovine perverseness in the animals threw a circuit in their brains and they now followed the horse.
Before sundown Kathy was too weak to stay on Rock by herself. Eddie left the rifle beside the trail, propping it upright with rocks so that one of the Snellings would have no trouble finding it tomorrow. He got Kathy to stay on the horse long enough for him to mount behind her. He held her on and rode and now there was no time to stop when the cramps made her cry out or when her efforts to vomit made her small body shudder.
Rock limped down the trail. The oxen lumbered along on the easier footing beside the river. Eddie’s arms ached with the strain of holding Kathy and the uneven movement of the horse made his task more difficult.
At dusk Kathy was a weight without strength of her own. She moaned and called for her mother. Sometimes, as if she had just roused from sleep, Kathy asked in a normal voice, “How far is it now?” And Eddie always answered, “Not far. We’ll be there soon.”
He no longer had faith that everything would change when he reached the wagons. Kathy was sick the same way Eddie’s parents had been sick, and they had died in two and a half days in spite of everything that Mrs. Snelling could do.
No, there would be no miracle achieved simply by reaching the camp; but there was still the hope that Kathy’s sickness was different in some way, that it wasn’t as bad as the cholera could be. A steady hope burned in Eddie, an argument against Kathy’s dying that he tried to base to bits of logic that he gathered from everything he had heard about the sickness.
But he held no longer a blind, unthinking faith in the powers or wisdom of adults. His parents, who had been an unquestioned source of strength and discipline, were gone; and the other grown-ups he must depend on in this crisis lacked his trust. Still, they were the only source of help.
In the dark his arms grew so tired as Kathy sagged against him that he had to stop and get down. He fell to the ground with his sister on top of him, lacking for a time the strength to use his arms. The horse stood like its name, shifting weight from its sore leg, blowing dust from its nostrils.
Kathy murmured plaintively, “Are we there?”
“Pretty soon now. It’s not far. Lizzie and Mrs. Snelling will take care of you.”
After a while Eddie lifted Kathy in his arms. He tried to lay her across the horse so that he could mount, but when he let go of her and tried to get up, she slid to the ground and cried out sharply, “Don’t leave me!”
He tied the reins together and put them around his arm. He lifted Kathy again and stumbled down to the creek with her and there he put her down, floundering about in the darkness until he found a bank high enough to mount from, while Rock stood in the creek. Holding the dead weight of Kathy in his arms, he got on the horse and went on.
Soon again he was tired, with his shoulder sockets burning. Again and again as the night wore on Eddie had to get down to rest and then to seek another place in the creek where Rock’s back would be low enough so that he could get on with Kathy in his arms.
His eyes strained to see a campfire. The Snellings would have a big one, and for all their traveling with people who followed the rules, they wouldn’t bother to put out their fire when they went to bed. But there was only velvety darkness around Eddie and the feeling of great space on all sides.
• • •
Some time during the night he led the horse into a place where the mud was deep and yielding. When Eddie tried to ride out of the river the mud held tight against Rock’s legs and the horse stumbled trying to get up the bank, pitching Eddie and Kathy into the stream. That was when Rock hurt his injured leg again so that he could barely hobble.
Eddie removed the bridle and tied it around Rock’s neck so that it wouldn’t be lost when he came back to get the horse, and so the reins wouldn’t drag and trip old Rock. He took his sister in his arms and walked, searching the night for the glow of a fire. The grass caught at his legs and bumps and hummocks made him stumble. He was afraid to cut back to the trail, somewhere on his left, because he knew he might miss it and cross it and go wandering toward the mountains.
Kathy’s body was burning hot against him, her bowels had run, and the wretched cramping still racked her. He gave her water from his hands whenever she wanted it, but it seemed to make the cramping worse.
It was a night that Eddie never remembered clearly afterward; but he did recall when the slow spreading of light began on the mountains. Kathy clung to him and called out for her mother then, and even looked around to see her mother and cried because she was not there.
At dawn Eddie went out on the trail, staggering through the dust that he kicked up in the cold air. When full light came he saw the wagons far ahead. He shouted and tried to run toward them but the effort made him stumble and gasp with weariness. He went another full mile before the wagons grew any larger in his vision.
The Snellings weren’t up yet. He could see no smoke. They ought to get up. They would see him then, out here on the trail, trying to reach them.
After another quarter of a mile Eddie recognized the terrible, stunning wrongness of what he saw.
There was only one wagon.
• • •
The full impact hit him when he reached it. While he was struggling toward it he had been thinking that he would have to go back after the oxen that had stopped when he left Rock, and then go on and overtake the Snellings.
But it was the Snelling wagon that was left. All the oxen were gone. The camp was a litter of discarded junk, ragged blankets, battered cooking utensils — all the things the Snellings had discarded when they took over the Cushman wagon.
On the salt desert, Ashley Cushman had loaned Rumsey his spare wheel. That was gone too. The Snelling wagon was resting on an oak bureau that had belonged to Mrs. Cushman.
Eddie put Kathy down on one of the ragged blankets. He stumbled around through scattered harness, past an ill-made yoke stained with blood from the sores it had worn on the necks of Rumsey’s oxen. For a few moments he had thought that someone must have been left to tell him and Kathy what to do. There was no one. There was no message. The worthless wagon was propped up on his mother’s bureau.
Kathy stirred and saw the wagon for the first time. “Where’s Lizzie, Eddie?”
Eddie was not old enough to lie and pretend any longer.
“They’re gone. They’ve gone on and they took our wagon.”
He watched Kathy’s face and despair gripped him when he gauged the seriousness of her condition by the fact that she was not alarmed by his words. “I want a drink, Eddie.”
Eddie picked up an iron pot and started toward the river. He walked across the place where the Snellings had been digging when he left to find the oxen. They had gone down scarcely three inches. A bitter anger that almost overcame him made him physically ill as he walked on. It would be like the Snellings, too lazy to dig, to drag his parents away from the camp and leave them for the coyotes.
; He took water back to Kathy and tried to make her comfortable in the shade. He carried still more water and washed her burning body with it. She seemed to feel better then. Oddly, his mother’s clothing and small personal possessions, carried in a small chest, had not been disturbed, and with them, although he didn’t think they had been stored there before, were Kathy’s dresses. Eddie threw away the filthy dress his sister had worn during the night and put clean clothes on her.
He sat beside her, sponging her face with water, refusing to let the tremendous silence bear upon him, refusing to look at the country around him. All night he stayed beside her. Sometimes her voice came to him from far away, rousing him after he had let his head fall forward on his knees in sleep.
Responsibility was a barb that kept ripping into his exhaustion. It aroused him at times when he had fallen on his side and gone to sleep, even though Kathy was not calling to him. There was no fire and he had lacked time to seek a way of making one.
Lack of facts about the fire site were to become a sore spot later, like nettles wiping across his mind whenever he thought of the subject. He didn’t know whether or not there had been warm ashes when he reached the camp, which would have proved that the Snellings had waited two days, at least. But Eddie hadn’t investigated the fire site until it was too late to tell how old the ashes were.
Sometime near dawn Kathy died. She had been talking to him lucidly minutes before, talking about Grandma Duncan’s orchard in Illinois. She lapsed into silence and Eddie fell asleep for a time. When he jerked back to consciousness — it could not have been very long, he knew — Kathy was dead.
He started to put her into the wagon, but a hatred of the Snellings rose in him so great that even their wagon was an evil thing. He covered Kathy with one of his mother’s dresses.
He was too numb then to feel grief. The Snellings had robbed him even of that. Eddie fell asleep wondering why he couldn’t cry. The hot sun woke him up hours later. Even though his mind tried to snap back quickly to his troubles, there was some vagueness now interposed between the facts around him and his reaction to them.
A stolid sort of daze was on him. He broke out of it only once during the morning, sobbing without tears because of the way the broken-backed shovel the Snellings had left behind kept buckling when he tried to dig into the sod near the river. Both Eddie and shovel were too weak for the job.
He had to dig Kathy’s grave at the very edge of the water.
On his way back to the wagon he discovered the graves of his parents. At least the Snellings had buried them. He knew there should be rocks heaped upon the graves, but when he cast around he could find only small stones. After a time the sheer futility of the task stopped him.
He went back to camp and looked for food.
Trampled in the dust were some kernels of corn and a handful of grain from the store Ashley Cushman had saved to give his oxen on the last hard haul across the Sierras. Eddie plucked what he could from the dirt and sat chewing, staring into space.
He wasn’t going to California. It was an accursed dream, and everything that had happened here at Gravelly Crossing could be laid to it. Eddie was going back to Grandfather Duncan and the orchards Kathy had talked of last night.
Although his remembrance of Grandfather Duncan, his home, his fields and barns was vague, still they were things known; they were real. What lay somewhere else was only a misty dream that killed. Eddie chewed the hard grain and the gritty corn The trail back home didn’t seem so bad, so long. He would take a blanket. He would find the rifle where he had left it, and he would go home.
He searched through the camp thoroughly. The Snellings had taken everything edible or useful except the things in his mother’s little chest, and they were of no use to Eddie Cushman. All he carried away was a ragged gray blanket as he went up the river. For the next ten days his life reverted to the fulfilling of two savage needs, hunger and shelter.
He found the rifle and the shot and powder where he had left it. Of Rock he never saw any sign again, but he came upon the two oxen when his hunger had long passed the gnawing, growling stage. Eddie knelt and aimed at Ben.
The cap had been on the nipple for days and it was dampened by dew and frost. It did not explode. Ben kept staring moodily at Eddie. With a fresh cap, Eddie aimed again and then he lowered the rifle. He had no knife and the hide of an ox was too tough to tear with the hands.
He went without food that day. The next evening he caught mice as they rustled in the grass. He ripped the skins off with his hands and gutted them with his forefinger. He gagged the first time he ate them. The following day he found a dead gull. He had cramps soon after he ate it.
Eddie never had clear remembrance of his journey up the Humboldt and on to Ruby Valley.
• • •
It must have been about the tenth day when he saw the trading post. A wagon train was just leaving it. Eddie could think of nothing he wanted from an emigrant train. There might be people in it who would feel obliged to take him with them to California.
He waited until the wagons were far away before he went toward the post. Two big gray dogs charged out. They walked around him, bristling, stiff-legged. He paid no attention to them as he went on, and the dogs, puzzled by his attitude, fell in behind him, sniffing at the sun-blackened remains of the jack rabbit he had been carrying and eating on for two days.
A woman came from the house, shading her eyes with her hand. She called and a man came out to stand beside her. The woman walked forward. “I swear those dogs are acting strange, as if they know him.”
She kept staring at the approaching figure, who wore a shirt made of a blanket scrap with a head hole and a strip of cloth tied around the middle. The dogs sniffed at the rabbit. They jumped away and wagged their tails apologetically when Eddie stumbled and made a quick motion to recover balance.
The woman cried, “My God, Hildreth, it’s a white boy!”
The man was big, taller than Eddie’s father, with piercing eyes under heavy, dark brows. “Where’d you come from, son?” he asked in a deep, puzzled tone.
“From Illinois.” Eddie’s voice was strange to him.
“That’s a fair piece.” The man glanced at his wife and then he turned his shrewd, penetrating look on Eddie again. There was kindness and understanding in his expression. He seemed to sense that a grim tale lay behind Eddie’s sudden appearance here. He studied Eddie’s worn boots, his ragged clothes, and the thin, starved look of him. “Are you hungry?”
“I guess so.” It was hard for Eddie to think of food other than that which you shot at close range or caught with your hands.
“From Illinois?” The woman looked at her husband with a puzzled expression. “Where’s your folks?”
“Dead,” Eddie said.
“On the trail?”
Eddie nodded.
Mrs. Hildreth thought she was getting the story straightened out. There was some of the gaunt tiredness of Mrs. Snelling in her expression, but she wasn’t like Mrs. Snelling at all, Eddie knew. She was strong and competent looking, the kind of woman who might have been able to save his parents if they had taken sick here instead of out there on the river.
“You poor thing!” A power of sympathy came into Mrs. Hildreth’s face. She reached out and put her hand on Eddie’s shoulder. He jerked away from her touch, startling one of the dogs that had lain down behind him.
“Leave him alone, Bess,” Hildreth said. “You want to wash up and have something to eat, son?”
“Thanks.” Eddie’s voice sounded strange to him, and the voices of the Hildreths were strange after his days of listening to the gulls. He felt that he could not spare many words, and at the same time he wanted to let his whole story out with a rush.
Mrs. Hildreth said, “But where are the rest of your wagons? The train that just left here hadn’t passed anybody on the trail. If you were coming — ”
“Never mind,” Hildreth said. “Come on, son. What’s your name?”
“Edd
ie.”
“I see.” Hildreth didn’t ask about a last name. He led the boy down to a creek and filled a cut-down barrel with water. “Take off your clothes and wallow, Eddie.”
Two squaws were cooking at a fire under a pole-and-bough shade that ran out from the end of one of the buildings. They glanced with curiosity at the scene. Ordinarily, Eddie would have been greatly embarrassed by their presence, but now he paid no attention to them as he undressed and stepped into the tub. Hildreth gave him a handful of soft soap from a wooden keg.
“Did you run into much game?” Hildreth asked.
Eddie watched the gray run off his body as he scrubbed away with his hands in the tepid water. He shook his head. Hildreth was shaking the dust from his clothes. “I’ll see if Ma can’t rustle up something for you to wear after you’ve had a bite to eat.”
When Eddie was dressing Hildreth held out the scrap of blanket. Eddie looked at it and his lips grew thin. He hurled it away. But he took the rifle that had belonged to Rumsey Snelling when he went to the house with Hildreth.
Sitting in a chair at a table gave Eddie a strange sensation. He picked up a fork and stared at the food on his plate and then he began to eat and each bite brought on a ravenous desire for more.
“It’s best to take it a little easy, if you haven’t had too much to eat lately,” Hildreth said. “How long you been out by yourself?”
“A long time,” Eddie said. He realized how intently the Hildreths were watching him and it made him uneasy.
Mrs. Hildreth said, “If that train this morning didn’t pass anyone on the salt desert, you must have come from somewhere down the Humboldt. Didn’t you?”
“Let him eat,” Hildreth said.
Eddie put his fork down. He had come from Gravelly Crossing, and he wished he could forget it. His feeling that it should not be talked about was hardening.