“It’s one of my many talents.” Nellie Louise’s dark hair curled all over her head and her bonnet had bounced loosely on her back when she’d bent to touch the ground. “Sorry I startled you.”
“How do you know you want me for a friend? I might be lazy or outspoken or maybe I tell tales.”
“I have times I like to lie around.” Nellie patted her lower lip with her finger and stood with pressure on one leg, the way a horse does when it’s waiting. “That’s the best thing about this trip so far: being a little lazy. I don’t have to constantly work in the garden or churn butter or make candles. That’s all been done or the oxen do it, churning butter as they plod along. Mostly I get to stitch as I walk, and after helping Mama with supper and all, I’m free to listen to the music or read—”
“You like to read?”
“Yes, I do!”
“Me too. It’s the most important time a person can spend.”
“Hmm, that sounds a little opinionated.” Nellie’s bonnet was made of scrap pieces stitched together in a hodgepodge design. Virgilia liked it. “My favorite book is The Last of the Mohicans.”
“I like The Crofton Boys. Have you read that story? My grandparents started the library in St. Charles. They loved books and literary things, and it was the best thing that ever happened to St. Charles, taking it from a simple town to one with lots of churches, schools, businesses.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Virgilia Pringle.”
“I like it. Telling stories always makes the day pass faster. I think I chose wisely in seeking your friendship.”
Virgilia laughed. “I’ve been looking for a chum, but I didn’t know how to find her.”
Nellie pushed her arm through Virgilia’s and got in step beside her. “I always say you have to go after what you want or it’ll slip away like a garter snake in the garden.”
“I do not like snakes of any kind.”
“Well, that’s a pretty strong opinion. But one I share. I think we’ll be fast friends indeed.”
Nellie’s hands were soft as velvet. “How do you get your hands so smooth?”
“I make a lotion.” She leaned into Virgilia. “It’s a secret. But now that we’re friends, I’ll share it. Glycerin and Dr. Atkinson’s Bay Rum, when my papa has it.”
“Does he know you use his cologne?”
“He hasn’t said. And my mama likes the lotion too. It smells good.” Nellie put her hand to Virgilia’s nose. “I’ll make you some.”
A friend! Virgilia’s view of the future turned as smooth as Nellie Louise’s lotion.
15
To Keep from Falling
People were injured and recovered; babies arrived and survived. Pherne let the flicker of memory of Oliver’s birth press its way forward, soft as dawn. It happened whenever she heard of a newborn on the trail. It had been such a happy time. Oliver had been healthy, learned to put weight on his little feet when she held his middle. She could still see his pink mouth open with a drop of moisture ready to fall as he concentrated until he bounced on her belly and they laughed together.
She pushed even pleasant memories aside when death appeared on the trail. The Henderson child drank a bottle of laudanum while evening fiddlers played and people danced Virginia reels and sang “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Salita Jane was the girl’s name. It was important to Pherne to learn and remember the names of the deceased along this trail. Later, that child couldn’t be awakened. A child whose life was an unfinished drawing, a mere sketch, never to be added onto. Pherne ached for the family, especially two older sisters who said they’d tasted from the bottle while their little sister watched. “We told her not to touch it,” they said through tears. But children do what they will. The child’s sisters would live with the guilt, always wishing they’d done something differently. Pherne knew that such a palette of regret could fade but never be painted over.
When a child died of scarlet fever diagnosed before they left the States, Pherne told her mother, “They ought not to have started out until after the child had recovered. Now they’ve exposed everyone. My children.” Pherne twisted a cotton wick and put it into the lantern.
“Now, Phernie. Maybe they thought she was healed enough. Maybe that poor mother had a husband who insisted they move out. You know how that can happen.”
Pherne nodded.
“That poor mother is already suffering. Don’t add future weights to an already-burdened soul.”
Then Pherne felt guilty for having judged another.
“I’ll pray you forgive yourself one day, Daughter.” Her mother looked up at her from the rocker she sat in, chores already finished.
“Why would you say that?”
But her mother didn’t answer. Did she doze? Then, “If you carry regrets into the future, the future won’t be a safe place either.”
Disjointed, that’s what Pherne was. The past claimed her like a web, sticky across her face, and blurred any clarity for viewing the future.
But there were signs of life and living on this road too. A Mrs. Richardson had an uneventful birthing, though the mother needed a tonic the day after. Pherne offered up a bit of whale oil in honey, and the woman thanked her, saying it had helped, and the party moved forward after the day’s delay. Pherne had known people to take small amounts of whale oil daily and live to ripe old ages, but she thought caution made sense. And the honey from Manthano’s supply sweetened the oil. She noticed a man from Ohio carried two hives of honeybees with him. Why hadn’t she thought of that as a way to serve her family and maybe a new business venture once they arrived? If she forced her mind to think of the future, perhaps it would blot out the past. Like births, burials slowed them, but Pherne was grateful the men stopped a day to honor the beginnings and the ends of being, even if they didn’t stop for the Sabbath.
A terrible storm hit them on May 25. Virgil wrote in his diary that it was a “hurricane” and maybe it was. In less than forty-five minutes, every wagon, man, woman, child, every animal and wagon box was soaked and every little river branch running full. They slept in wet beds that night and rounded up cattle for two days. She complained to herself of monotony and then moaned aloud at the next overturned barrel, hornet stings, or stampede. She hated every minute of this terrible road, each step taking her farther away from Oliver and into an uncertain future. She couldn’t imagine the many more months they’d be traveling with such regret on her palette.
Smaller groups of blue-painted wagons passed them, and then sometime later, on a higher part of the prairie, Pherne looked down into a swale with wagons spread out like spokes of paths through a sea of yellow and purple wildflowers. She put her hand to her breast and blinked. It was beautiful. White wagon covers like ivory dominoes dotted the plains; dust billowed up behind brown sticks of mules or oxen, speckled white on red. Green wagons, red wheels breathing brown dust, a rainbow of colors. Tears formed in her eyes. It reminded her of a landscape painted with beauty in vastness, deepened with detail. “Hobbema’s work,” she said out loud.
“What, Mama?” Emma asked her. The child slipped her hand into Pherne’s while Buddy trotted along beside them, his tongue hanging out in the heat.
“A Dutch painter of landscapes. They invented that word, did you know that?”
“You sound like Gramo.”
“Do I? Well, the Dutch painted seascapes all the time and then wanted to paint the interior of their country so they called it ‘landscapes.’ What I see out there reminds me of a picture in that big book of painters that I had to leave behind.”
“You didn’t leave it if it’s right in front of you, Mama.”
She laughed, squeezed her daughter’s hand. “You’re so right, Emma.” Maybe she was a part of something large—they all were. This train of covered wagons moved unwieldy yet with design. A verse from 2 Samuel came to her: “Thou has enlarged my steps under me; so that my feet did not slip.” This vista had cracked that shell of memory, split her open at her breastbon
e. She did not need to fear falling—into her past. Even in the sameness interrupted by moments of sheer panic, her steps were being enlarged. And for that moment she looked forward, feeling solid and sure. Maybe she could capture that opening of her heart with her pencils.
No, not yet.
In early June the sand hills of the Platte rose like whipped cream peaks. Virgil said they were “romantic” and reminded him of snowdrifts. “Why don’t you capture that, Phernie? Get your pencils out.”
“I don’t deserve to enjoy my sketching.”
Buddy hobbled ahead, chasing who knew what. His leg swung out oddly, a residual of the raccoon attack. Wounded beings were everywhere on this trail.
Virgil dismounted and led his horse to walk beside her. “There was nothing you could do. Oliver simply slipped away. Whether you’d have been churning butter or hovering over him. He just went to sleep.”
“The down comforter was too thick and he couldn’t breathe. If I hadn’t been drawing, I might have heard his choking.”
Virgil shook his head. “There’s no evidence he choked. He wouldn’t want you to punish yourself by avoiding something that always brought you joy.” How many times Virgil had heard her story and yet he never sounded frustrated with her, never dismissed the pain in her memory. “He was a character. Remember when he tried to learn to wink?”
Pherne smiled. “His face scrunched up like an old apple.”
Virgil looked out and her eyes followed his.
The sand hills before them were beautiful. “See what you can capture. Draw it for Oliver.” He bent inside her bonnet to kiss her cheek, laughed when the brim poked his forehead. He rode off and Pherne waited for the wagon to pass by, then pulled herself up onto the back, opened the trunk, and took out her pad and pencils. She made her way to the front and sat on the wagon seat. She drew to capture the beauty of this exotic place. She drew to find a new memory for Oliver, one that placed him on this road with them, inspiring her fingers to capture a moment, an interior landscape. She’d forgotten how soothing the lead in her hands could feel, how uplifting to her soul to be praying with pencils, enlarging her steps, keeping her feet from falling.
“They always squish,” Sarelia complained. They’d stopped at the mouth of Ash Hollow after hours of a steep-slope passage. Virgilia and her siblings had been forced to carry things to lighten the load and save wear on the brakes. Once there, children gathered up chokecherries and currants while whiffs of wild roses scented the air.
“You’re supposed to put them in the basket, not in your tummy,” Virgilia told her. “How else can I make a tasty pudding tonight if you consume them all?”
“But I like to eat them.” Sarelia popped another into her mouth, then held up her small palm speckled in red.
“I’ve an idea.” Nellie Louise lifted her skirt and tore a small section from her third petticoat. “Would you give me your apron, Sarelia?”
Sarelia complied and Nellie pulled a threaded needle from her pincushion and sewed three sides of the patch onto the bodice of Sarelia’s apron. “I call it an outside pocket. The top is left open so you can put berries inside and you don’t have to push through your skirts to the underskirt pocket.”
“I could put all kinds of things in there.” Sarelia pulled the apron back over her head, her hands leaving red berry stains. Then she dropped currants into the pocket. “Rocks I find will fit in here.”
“Not at the same time as the berries,” Virgilia told her. “You’ll have jam.”
“It’s pretty. Thank you, Nellie.” She fingered her outside pocket.
“Not too hard. You’ll squish them!” The older girls laughed.
“I can share with Gramo.” Sarelia ran ahead to the wagon where her gramo sat on the harp-back chair.
“Where’d you learn about an outside pocket?” Virgilia asked.
Nellie Louise shrugged. “It’s a way to carry something small and keep it protected without having to find the skirt slit for the inside pocket. I should have put a little flap over the top, then it would look like a tiny saddlebag. That’s where I got the idea. It’s a way to carry something small and keep it protected.”
“It was kind of you, but you shouldn’t waste your petticoats on such as that. What if you need them for bandages or—”
“Are you a worry worm?”
Virgilia frowned. “You mean like a bookworm, only one who worries? That’s not me. That’s more my mama.” Wasn’t it?
“Would you like a pocket? I can sew one on your apron too.”
“I wasn’t asking for anything.” Virgilia didn’t know why she was now annoyed.
Nellie Louise had spent the previous night with them, her parents’ wagons far ahead. Many children clustered in a cousin’s wagon, moving back and forth. It was an advantage of families traveling together, Virgilia supposed. Her uncle Orus’s wagons were several days ahead, as he piloted the faster-moving portion of the train.
“Sorry,” Nellie Louise apologized. Her friend noticed Virgilia’s moods better than anyone. “My mama is always looking for ways to fix things. I’ve stood too close and it’s sprinkled on to me, I guess.”
Virgilia liked that image. “I sprinkle my sisters with flour when I’m baking. And being a bit bossy. I’m pretty messy too.”
“You plunge into what you love. Me too. We’re passionate. That’s what I’d call it. Messy is something to avoid, but being passionate, well, who doesn’t want that?” Nellie Louise flailed her arms about like a stubby windmill, turning and turning, making Virgilia laugh out loud. Who indeed? Her new friend could bring on annoyance, but her passion whisked it away. Virgilia wished her friend would sprinkle more of that passion on her.
Another mouth of a stream. Pherne wondered that the men seemed to know the name of each of these bodies of water. That they did should be reassuring that they were on the right trail, that others had gone before them. The maps inside their heads were getting them where they needed to go and ought to be reducing her anxiety about the unknown. This stream was called Ash Creek. Not too far down the draw on a bad road, they came across a cabin with the title of “Ash Grove Hotel.”
“Look at that,” she told her mother. “Some hotel.”
“Fanciful thinking,” her mother said. “Nothing wrong with that, way out here. Thinking big. I can admire a man who does that.”
Inside was a single plank bar and the men could order up warm beer if they chose. Fortunately, Virgil did not, even though the owner claimed the beer was “as good as a Bavarian brew.” Uncle John began his speech about the evils of liquor to thirsty travelers as Virgil prodded him back outside.
The owner nodded toward a large ledger book sitting on the plank counter. “Go ahead, folks. Leave messages to let those behind know you’ve made it this far and are all right.”
Pherne held it for her mother to read as she stood with both hands on her walking stick. “Look, there’s Orus’s loopy signature. And the date.” Her brother had been through a week previous. He had made a notation next to his name. Hurry along, Pringles and Tabitha Brown.
“It’s like Orus to rally us.” Her mother grinned. “And not reference that I’m his mother.”
Pherne didn’t find it laughable. A twinge poked at her ribs looking at her brother’s comment. He was ahead that far? What if they needed help? Or had a question about their direction? Would Virgil know the way without Orus? Did she have more confidence in her brother than in her husband? Orus had spent more time farther ahead and his wagons kept up a faster pace than Virgil’s or her mother’s and that concerned her. Maybe Virgil should push harder.
Her unsettledness didn’t lessen as they passed new landscape markers, even when she sketched the jagged lines of Parker’s Castle with its steep chimney that made the rock formation look like a castle in the middle of the continent. They plodded onward. The next week Orus sent a messenger back, telling them that in two days’ time they’d find a Sioux Indian gathering of two hundred lodges. “You’re to give �
�em a feast, Pilot Brown says.”
A feast? What was her brother thinking? Feeding their own families and two hundred lodges of Indians? No one else questioned her brother’s orders and the women worked up a frenzy preparing corn patties and venison the men had bagged. Later, Pherne had tried to sketch the gathering, men and women sitting in clusters, horses swishing tails, nearly naked children rushing in and out of teepees while dozens of dogs scattered about. Her renditions of humans lacked skill, she decided, so she didn’t attempt to draw the men with their feathers woven into their long black hair nor the big clay pipe that was passed around the circle. She focused on the landscape and how the hide teepees blended into the hills.
Her three sons were ecstatic with the pomp and circumstance, but the women sat back, exhausted from preparing the meat, using dried fruits and vegetables from home, turning that fine flour into breads and cakes for this feast rather than for their own families. The men traded lead and ammunition and in return got the promise of safe travel through the Sioux country. Pherne hoped the ammunition wouldn’t be turned back on the seventy wagons that had joined up for the feast. They’d delayed more than a day and Virgil called it a “good investment.” Prayer would be their best investment.
The following days, they wound the wagons through wide vistas of pink sand despite the meandering North Platte with water aplenty. Pelicans landed on the islands. She hadn’t seen those birds since the Chesapeake. Rock formations they could see for miles before approaching rose up out of the sand, with names like Independence and Split Rock. Pherne noticed she felt light-headed at times, even giddy, laughing overmuch at something Emma said or Buddy’s antics. Virgil said it was the altitude. “But I can’t feel any difference.”
“We are climbing. Word is we’ll be at South Pass soon—that’s the divide when rivers start running west.”
“Uncle John was . . . disoriented this morning. He even wanted to teach my mother how to play the violin.”
This Road We Traveled Page 12
