Tinsmith 1865

by Sara Dahmen

  Father determines we will say a prayer over our food, just as we used to do when Mother was alive, so even in this rough and tumble space we bow our heads. He murmurs his offering, but I am too far away across the fire to hear what he says.

  As we eat, Al relays what he has learned from the other wagon drivers. A small pack of wolves was spotted. Some bison are on the horizon to the far north.

  No Indians so far.

  The papers simultaneously call them awful and noble savages. Like so many others, my men believe the Indians to be less than us, and their ways barbaric and strange. Father thinks they should all turn to Christianity, and their problems with us will be solved and there won’t be fights at all anymore. Tom is not so straightforward. He knows battle, even saw our middle brother Lou die on the field. Sometimes he says things that make me think he sees how people come of different minds, and ideas can grow and fester even between whites, just as it was in the war.

  But the war in the south is over, and Tom is returned even if Lou is buried in the South. And the war in the Plains is over too, so they say.

  “What did you pay for the onions?” Al’s light question makes Tom frown and breaks up the conversation about the specter of the Indians.

  “I trading them.” Sometimes, when Father speaks with emotion, his accent sits heavily on his tongue, adding to the fact that he never fully mastered English. When he admits guilt, it is also very much pronounced.

  “How?”

  “Ojciec decided to trade a box.” Tom glowers from his corner next to the wagon. He slouches over against the spokes, and his boots splay out so exterior wear marks where he walks on the outside of his feet are visible.

  “It is being fine.” Father shrugs and his tone brokers no further debate. The wind picks up and stirs his beard, cropped shorter than usual in practicality for the journey west. His jaw pushes out from under the bushy brows and fat mustache, and he settles deeper into his seat. I curl my knees up under my chin, and hold in my own thoughts as best I might. It doesn’t matter if the boys ever have issue with Father. They’ll lose any argument they make with him, and my voice will only get lost if I add it.

  “We do not be needing to arrive full of stock,” Father finally continues. “Walter and his son do not require us so—that is never part of our plan. Besides, we have the machine, to take much time from our hands, to allowing us making many more pieces quickly. You knowing this.”

  My throat closes. Yes. The machine that is hiding and broken. Will they believe it was done during the jostling of the journey? Surely none of them will suspect me? The guilt flattens my lungs. I should speak up. But how? My cowardice shames me, but I don’t want to admit defeat or wrongdoing, and my tongue sticks.

  Father’s confidence in an argument is unshakable. My brothers deflate, but not for long. Tom speaks up.

  “And what if we use up all our tin right away?”

  “We will not. We be having enough.”

  I think of the crates, heavily bound and full of metal, in the back of the wagon. Father himself oversaw most of the packing in those frantic weeks in early June, after Mother passed and just before Tom returned from his years serving in the Board of Trade Light Artillery regiment. Al had managed daily tin orders and had sold furniture so we could all leave on the railroad three days after Tom stepped back into the tinshop on June twenty-second. I still recall the blasting arguments shaking the walls of the shop and house when my oldest brother had realized not only that Mother was gone, but we were to leave Chicago only a few days after his return.

  But leave we have. The train took us from Chicago to Marshalltown, and there we bought the schooner, filling it with the outlandishly heavy boxes Father had packed all by himself throughout the nights after Mother’s death, holding all the tin sheets and the machine, too.

  I know the machine cost the equivalent of a month’s wages because the boys talk about it endlessly. The broken machine, now.

  I gulp down my fear. I hope this journey is worth it. I hope we find the work Walter the blacksmith promised. I hope my brothers are able to set up their own shops somehow, as they’ve always planned. I hope Father is truly happy again, if only for distraction..

  As the night builds and the stars burn brighter, my brothers shift, their bellies heavy with hot soup. Tom leaves our campsite to take his turn as part of the early watch. Al rolls out blankets and curls around the fire, already used to the bumpy, hard, ground.

  “The onions did well. Dobranoc. Good night.”

  I look up at Father, where he stands over me. He is treating me as he would have treated Mother. My heart feels as though it bleeds.

  “Good night,” I echo.

  He turns on his heel and disappears into the wagon. I hear the wooden box creak and pop as he shuffles around the narrow space at the back. He will likely sleep next to the machine. I think he feels better when it is nearby, even if he must sleep in a cramped and musty place.

  Damn. My luck will be that he pulls out the machine and notices it’s broken!

  I glance up at the moon. It is only half-full. Soon it will wane to nothing but a slip of a fingernail crescent. It is brighter out here, and some nights the moonlight is as brilliant as day. The bed of starlight tracing across the heavens is clearer and truer than the yellowed, stinking lights of Chicago. If I stopped worrying, I might actually enjoy the beauty of the west.

  CHAPTER THREE

  5 July 1865

  The rifles sound like firecrackers. At first, that’s what I think they are: firecrackers left over from a July Fourth celebration, likely tied to the tail of someone’s cat or dog for the fun of it. I roll over and hit my temple on a pebble.

  “Damnit!”

  “Hush!” Al hisses, sitting up and barely visible against the smoke of our half-dead campfire. “That’s shots.”

  “Shots? Pft. Someone’s drunk.” Tom groans, turning in his blanket. “Shut it, both of you. I’m just into bed myself. Damn, I hate the middle of the night watch.”

  “It’s better than the first watch,” Al grouses. “I’ve been on that this week, and I can’t wait for next week when—”

  “Be quieting!” Father pokes his head out of the wagon back. “It’s a gun.”

  As he mentions it, another round of shooting goes off, and the flash and burn of the powder and flame on the far side of the wagon circle sets off a scream among the women and children. It ripples through the night, and bursts into each camp. I close my lips together to keep my own sounds in check, but a whimper escapes all the same.

  Then the whoops begin. They are eerie, and echo around us. It sounds as though a thousand Indian braves are staring at the huge circle of wagons and yodeling. My scream matches the others, and I shrink down, feeling cowardly and completely unable to survive all at the same time.

  “Święty piekło! Holy hell!” Tom jumps to his feet, his bulk moving faster than I’ve ever seen. He is white as paste, even in the moonlight, but his face is tight and hard under the beard. “Where’s our guns?” He shouts hoarsely to Father to pull out the cartridge boxes and powder horns.

  I creep on all fours toward the wheels, wincing hard as each shot rings out. The next round of whoops fills my ears and stops my eyes. I’m blind, dragging my silly feet and my hands through the dirt, my toes hitting every rock, and my fears colliding in one unspeakable swallow.

  How many are there? Will they scalp us? Shoot us? Kidnap us?

  Will they torture us?

  Dearest God, what were those stories on torture again? The running, the gauntlet … was that the Plains Indians or another kind? Why can’t I move faster?

  This is what I’ve feared the most on this journey and now it’s here.

  It’s happening!

  Jezus! Help me! Maryja, Matka Boża! Mary, Mother of God, save me!

  The wagon wheel is scant cover, and Father’s bulk shifts and tumbles out, the gleaming tin cartridge boxes and the hard horns of powder spraying from his fingers. One bursts open at the
cap, and the dull, black, gunpowder flies up like tiny black gnats, disappearing into the grass.

  “Where’s Marie?” Father shouts as he goes, and Tom points toward the shadow of the wagon.

  “Here!” I call, but my voice sounds small and lost amid the spreading gunfire. Shapes swarm on the far end of the wagon circle, flickering black and gold and red around the half-eaten fires, and the racket of more rifles shooting into the blank wilderness around us covers half my yell. Did Father hear?

  “Stay here!” Father orders, and he vanishes into the dark with Tom. I grip the hard wood spokes of the wheel, and jump so high I hit my head on the bottom of the wagon box when a body dives next to me.

  “What—?”

  “Shhh! It’s me.” Al rearranges himself and crouches nearby. Even in the dark, his face is slick with sweat and paler than Tom’s. When his arm pushes against me, the tremor of his body shakes into mine, and I instinctively put my arm about his shoulders.

  More whispers and rustling syphon through my ears, sighing and soughing, and at first I think it’s Indians creeping up at our backs. I jerk and turn as best I can in the cramped quarters, but the prairie is washed in moonlight where it slowly opens onto the land. The clouds scuttle away and all the stars reveal their glory. The grassland is empty. There are no Indians, at least not behind us.

  At least, not that I can see.

  There are more whispers, and I finally notice many families hiding inside and under their wagons. The Cooley’s have six children still living, and all of them are huddled around Agatha. In the strange, shadowed, dark, they look like a teeming mass of strange half-beasts, and my mind wanders to the pictures I’ve seen of the Indian savage in newspapers back in Chicago. Fear cranks into my mind again, and I strain to hear more whoops and hollers. The gunfire continues here and there, but suddenly settles considerably.

  “They’ve scared them off, it sounds,” Al echoes my thoughts, and shrugs off my arm from his shoulders. “I should … maybe go see?”

  “Stay here!” I hiss. “What’s the point? You don’t have a gun ready anyway.”

  “I can grab the extra from the wagon—”

  “Damn it, Wojciech!” I use his given Polish name as Mother would have done, and it draws him up hard and quiet at once. “There’s no reason to go right now. Stay here.”

  “So I … can protect you?”

  “Something like that.”

  Another rustle stalks the shadows behind our wagon, and I lunge on instinct when I feel the box above us creak.

  Someone is stealing in! Someone’s taking our food! Our goods!

  The burring machine!

  I scream without realizing I’m screaming, until the sound of it rips through my throat and rakes it raw. Pounding my hands on the underside of the wood, I stand faster than my feet can move, and whack my head straight on the bottom of the wagon.

  “Get out!” I screech. “Out! We’ve got a gun!”

  The motion pauses, and out of the corner of my eye, I notice the teeming Cooley clan has frozen.

  “Wynoś się! Get the hell out!” I smack my hands against the side of the wagon, uncertain if I dare to climb in. I have nothing! Nothing but my voice!

  Is it savages? Is it—?

  The shards of broken, brittle, grass crackle again, and I spin once more, my heart suspended completely in the back of my chest, my hands going up and out to protect my face.

  “Marie! It’s us!” The whisper is hoarse.

  I let my hands down slightly, and take in the black shadows of Tom and Father. My arms are shaking and my stomach twists. Is it relief or is it fear?

  Who the hell is in the wagon?

  “What’s going on?” Tom’s voice is very soft, and his dark eyes are trained on the back of the wagon.

  “Someone’s inside.” My eyes spin toward the wagon, and I remember Al is still huddled under the box.

  “Who?”

  “How should I know?” I back away slowly, staring at the hulking frame. The campfires on the other side cast a barely visible red edge to it, and it’s impossible to see in through the fabric. The wagon moves again, and I round behind Tom, glad of his large height for once.

  “Al’s under yet,” I murmur into his back. “Be careful.”

  “Shit! Al’s under the wagon!” Tom mutters to Father and another man who joins in. “Watch it.”

  The guns slide in unison, curving onto their shoulders. The dull silvery steel of the Bridesburgs capture the bit of firelight and glow gold on the lock plates. I suddenly wonder if I’m overreacting. Maybe there’s no one in the wagon. Maybe my own foolish, womanly eyes … But no. Al felt it too. I’m sure of it.

  “Come out careful. There’s multiple guns on you now. If you come out peaceful we won’t fill you with lead,” Tom calls.

  I wait, breathless, my blood still pounding erratically. Behind and around us, more men slip forward, guns trained on the wagon.

  The machine! Our goods! Our food!

  We still have nearly two weeks to go, we need our food …

  My place is taken by a few more of our wagon neighbors. I can’t see over the manly heads anymore, but Tom is still in the front, calling lowly, and with growing anger.

  “Get out!” someone finally yells. “Show your face, you damn coward!”

  The cry picks up at once, and a gun goes off into the air, and women scream, and it’s all very confusing and dark and the bodies around me press and pitch forward, jostling and shouting until I’m spit out at the back end of the mass.

  “Al!” I shout, hoping my brothers hear me, hoping they remember. “Be careful of Al!”

  No one hears me, though, not even Father, and in another minute the wagon is crawling with men. The screaming and yelling and shouting only get louder and higher when Tom appears at the back, with his black beard flying and his black eyes burning, and he throws a body deep into the crowd.

  “There’s one of our Indians, boys!” he bellows, his face a mask of stiffness and strange, contorted rage.

  There’s a scuffle and more shouting, and then a tall, lanky man is spun upwards, his wrists twisted tightly behind him with someone’s raggedy scarf, his thin, gaunt, cheeks purple and red.

  “You can sit with the others and wait your trial,” Franks, the wagon master, declares from his place among the shadows. “First light.”

  The thief disappears within the crowd, and the shouting melts away slowly and carefully, though at least two more muskets go off without warning. I jump both times.

  “What the hell were you thinking? He could have stabbed you! Shot you!” Tom fumes, shaking my arm suddenly. I glance up at him and pull my lips in, pressing them against my teeth to fight any retort careening through my mind.

  “My Marie is being very brave, I am thinking,” Father says quietly, just as Al slowly, reluctantly, crawls out from under the wagon.

  “You alright, too?” One of the last of our neighborly helpers grasps Al’s forearm and yanks him up.

  “Fine.”

  “Pfft. Of course he is. He sat hidden in a little black hole and let our sister do the screaming,” Tom says.

  “I thought it was Indians,” Al says sullenly, and turns toward his wadded bedroll.

  “It wasn’t Indians!” Tom says to Al’s back, but our youngest brother refuses to speak at all, which is saying something. I stare at Tom and Father and their rifles in various stages of readiness, and inhale a shaky bit of night air. Fatigue pummels into me all at once, and I let my mouth go loose.

  “If it wasn’t Indians, what was it?”

  “A couple of the drifting men, pretending to be Indians to scare people on one end, only to have the rest of them try to steal from the wagons on the other,” Tom explains. “A good notion, too, if the man doing the stealing is smart enough to pick a wagon that’s empty.”

  “Ours was empty,” I remind.

  “Well, but you were under it and not being shy about screaming,” Father grins at me briefly.

 
; I shudder slightly at the memory of the fear that had split my mind in half. Suddenly the bent burring machine feels a paltry, small, thing in the face of all the scrabbling and worry and very real violation of our private traveling house.

  “Pah! Marie’s not shy about letting anyone know she’s nervous,” Tom scoffs, and moves toward our fire and away from the gloomy night.

  “So not Indians,” I repeat, needing to say it once more.

  “Not being Indians,” Father agrees, his heavy hand guiding me toward our beds as well.

  “Now what—what happens to the men doing all the mischief?” I ask as we smooth out our blankets once more, and Father smashes around the coals to bring more heat out from under their layer of black, ashy chips.

  “We are waiting for Franks to get a court together tomorrow. It will be being like Chicago, with a jury and judge and even having witnesses, and someone is likely having to be standing and be speaking for the guilty.”

  “But they’ll be found guilty, won’t they, Father?”

  “They’d better,” Tom growls from his corner by the wagon wheel. He’s a huddled shadow. Al is flat and tight as a board on the other side of the fire. “No question. Guilty.” Tom puts his head behind his arms and looks upward. “And then they’ll hang between the wagons. I hope they use ours. Ha!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  8 July 1865

  “Morning, Marie.”

  I crack an eye. Al grins at me from across the fire. He is always the first one up, as if the sun sets his sleeping and waking. He makes the coffee and starts the fire, and the two of us share a cup before the others generally make an appearance. I appreciate it; I am not very good at making the morning brew.

  “Sleep well?” he asks, twisting his mouth.

  “That’s a bad question,” I retort.

  We have about seven days left before we reach Flats Town. For all I’m worried about the hard work needed to build a new life, and though I fear the roughness of the west against the ease of the city, I’m barely able to think for the fretting consuming my thoughts as my feet pound the dirt each day.