“Scared, cold, and worried, but no injuries. They’ve been real troopers, helping me to take care of you and not complaining.” He paused. “They’ve been praying hard, too. We didn’t know if you’d live.”
“Jan, I’m so grateful.”
He cut her off. “No, not a word. I’m just glad you’re alive. Hey!” he lightened his tone. “After a week of being mother and father to three small kids, I’d have given you a good shake and told you to come back and help me out if you’d died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. Remember, I’m the oldest of thirteen. I know how to change diapers. By the way, Evie is now totally independent in that area.”
“You trained her?” said Tildie, incredulous.
“Well, I took off the nappies completely and encouraged her to lift up her dress and squat. She’s gotten very good at it.”
Tildie started to laugh, but the pain caused her to groan instead—albeit with a smile on her lips.
When they started out, Evie and Mari rode double on the back of Horse with the travois attached behind. Jan led the horse, and Gladys trotted beside Tildie’s travois as if she had appointed herself guardian. Next, Boister held Charlie’s reins. Greedy Gert followed docilely behind.
The travois consisted of two long poles attached to a harness over Horse’s shoulders. The free ends dragged behind the horse with a blanket secured in a sling-like fashion between them. Tildie was strapped in and surrounded by most of their belongings.
It was two days’ travel, and the days became a blur of jostling and pain for Tildie. She awoke the third night inside a cabin, lying on a pine needle bed with a heavy blanket beneath her and a quilt on top. She could hear the sound of the others’ breathing and saw dimly a dying fire glowing in a fireplace across the room. Beyond that she could see the horses. She was confused. Was she in a cabin or a barn?
“Jan,” she whispered into the dark.
There was a stirring beside the bed, and Jan’s head appeared inches from hers.
“Are you all right? Do you need something?”
“We’re at your cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Where is everybody?
“Mari and Evie are over there on a pallet. Gladys and Boister are there.” He pointed them out in the dim light. “Do you want a drink?”
“Yes.”
He rose from his pallet in one fluid movement. She was astonished again at how well such a big man moved. He moved more like an Indian than a white man. Now that she had lived among the Arapaho, she could appreciate the difference. Very few white men had such grace.
He returned with the cup, handed it to her, and laughed softly when he had to rescue the cup before she dropped it. He helped her sit up, and she drank it all.
“Thank you.”
He lowered her and put the cup on the floor. “Are you all right?” he asked again. “You feel feverish.”
“I ache,” she said but chose not to elaborate. “It feels strange to be sleeping by myself. After all, there have been six bodies in the lean-to for weeks.”
“Six?”
“I was counting Gladys.” She could feel herself getting sleepy again. “Are there horses in your living room?” she asked, not sure to trust her vision.
“Yes.”
She looked at his strong face. He was smiling. “Jan, don’t go away. I’m frightened tonight.”
“Why?” He held her hand and smoothed the hair back from her hot, dry forehead.
“I think something’s wrong. Inside. I don’t think I’m going to live.”
“Don’t say that, Tildie.”
She sighed, and the effort made her wince.
“You are going to live. You would’ve died by now if you were going to. Every day you’re stronger.”
“Not tonight, Jan. Something’s wrong.”
“Please, Tildie, don’t talk like that. Rest.”
“Jan, I’m glad you came to get us. I’m sorry I’m such a burden.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead. If possible, she was hotter than she had been only a few minutes before. “Tildie, don’t do this. Don’t die. You have to fight.”
She was unconscious, and he stood abruptly, his hands clenched at his sides. His chin came up, and he stared at the ceiling.
“Lord, I want this woman. Don’t let her die. I feel like she’s always been a part of my life. I loved her before I met her. She’s the woman I knew I’d meet one day. God, You understand. She’s my other part. She’s kind and brave and laughs like a child when she’s happy. Don’t let her die. Tell me what to do for her. Don’t take her away. Let me be her husband. Let me take care of her. Give her into my hands, Lord. Let me cherish her. God, don’t take her.”
The fever raged during the night. Jan brought snow in from outside and barely let it melt before dipping a rag into it and wiping her face, neck, and arms. When Boister awoke in the morning he helped. When Mari joined them a few minutes later, Jan took off the blanket that had been kicked about as she struggled against the fever. “Here, each of you take a rag and wash her legs with the cool water.”
“Is she going to die now?” asked Mari.
“Is it because we moved her?” asked Boister.
“We had to leave,” answered Jan. “Heavy snow fell last night. We got to the cabin just in time. God was with us in making that trip. He’ll be with us through this.”
The eyes of the two small children looked at him. They were scared, and he was, too. He knelt on the floor and gestured for them to come to him. They walked into his arms and held on to one another, taking comfort in the agony and hope that they shared.
“Pray, Mari. Pray, Boister.” He had meant for them to pray throughout the day, but Mari took him literally. She folded her little hands in front of her. Still leaning heavily against him, she began, “God, we love Tildie. You already have Pa and Mama. We want Tildie to stay here. Please don’t take her.” Her little face screwed up, and she buried it in Jan’s shoulder.
“God,” said Boister. “I promise not to hate You for taking Pa and sending John Masters. I promise to listen to Jan’s stories and learn to read the Bible. I won’t hide when it’s chore time. I won’t tease Mari and Evie. I won’t give Tildie a hard time when she wants me to practice my sums. I’ll be good. Always. Please, don’t let Tildie die.”
Jan squeezed them, fighting the tears in his eyes. “You don’t have to make a bargain with God, Boister. He wants to give us good things without making deals.”
“I’ve been telling Him bad things in my head. I told Him He’s no good ’cause He didn’t do right by my family. I told Him He’s mean and awful. He’s going to take Tildie because I’m bad.”
“No, Boister, no. That’s not the way God works. People may act like that because people aren’t holy like God, but God is bigger and better than people. God loves us, and He will take care of us. Even when we don’t understand, He is faithful. He is just. He’s in control. We must trust Him. We have to, Boister. He wants to bless us. I don’t understand why all this has happened. I do know that I love your cousin. If you hadn’t been in that Indian camp, I never would have met her.”
“If He kills her now, it don’t mean much,” sobbed Boister.
“God doesn’t kill people.” Jan sounded desperate now. How could he explain so the little boy would understand? What was Mari thinking? Was she just as confused? “Sometimes He takes people to heaven because it would be too hard on them down here. Think of all the pain Tildie’s been in. What if that were to go on forever? In heaven, she won’t hurt any more. She’ll be well.”
“Do you want her to die?” Boister’s voice was small and choked.
“No, I want her to live. But that’s what I want. That isn’t necessarily what God wants. Maybe that isn’t what’s best for Tildie. We have to give up what we want and ask God to do what’s best for her. It’s not your fault she’s sick.”
“I pushed the wagon.” His voice was so low, Jan almost co
uldn’t make out the words.
“What?”
“The wagon with the rocks. One wheel was stuck. I pushed it to get it over the rock, and I stumbled and hit it sideways. It slid over the edge. It killed my pa.”
“How old were you, Boister?”
“Three.”
“And you remember this?”
Boister nodded his downcast head. “I dream about it. I think about it every day. I can hear the men shouting. I hear the rocks and the wagon creaking.”
“Boister, you were three. Look at Mari, how little she is. You were a little boy. That wagon must have weighed a ton. Boister, you couldn’t have knocked it off the path with your puny little shove. It was going anyway. You didn’t do it. You were too little.”
“I did it. I fell and it slid away, down the bank. I did it.”
There was desperation in his voice and Jan knew it was important to get through to him. “Boister, no. You didn’t do it.” Jan sent up a quick plea for help. What could he say to relieve this child’s anguish? “Boister, remember the rock at the camp—the one you climbed on? You couldn’t move that rock, could you?”
Boister shook his head.
“I couldn’t even move that rock, Boister. Even if we got it in a wagon, I couldn’t move the wagon. If you took all the smaller rocks that your Pa and those men had been moving that day, and put them together, they would have been about as big as that rock. Boister, you didn’t knock the wagon over. You couldn’t have. It’s just a coincidence that you bumped it just as it was going over anyway.” Jan, with one arm still securely around Mari, tilted his head to look at Boister’s partially hidden face. “Do you understand, Boister? You could not have moved that wagon.”
Boister’s shoulders shook, and Jan held him closer. Soon, the sobs broke out, and the little boy shuddered as all the pent-up guilt released.
Evie woke and Mari slipped over to talk quietly to her as Jan rocked Boister in his arms.
Later as they ate breakfast, Boister stirred his mash with little enthusiasm. Jan watched him but said nothing. To his eye, the boy looked more relaxed. Jan could only pray the talk had done him good.
For a day and a half more, Tildie was delirious, fighting the fever and sometimes lashing out at Jan as he put the cooling cloths on her forehead. During the second night, the fever broke. The children awoke to find both Jan and Tildie sleeping soundly. Boister told the girls to be quiet, and he sliced them biscuits from two days before and gave them warmed water to drink.
The girls quietly played with their two dolls while Boister attempted to clean up. They needed more firewood, so he bundled up, admonished the girls to be quiet, and took Gladys out to gather what he could find.
CHAPTER 10
We’re cold.” Mari tugged at Jan’s sleeve.
“Code,” agreed Evie, bobbing her head up and down.
Jan stretched and looked over at Tildie. She was sleeping restfully on the pine needle mattress. He reached for his boots and pulled them on. The room was chilly, the fire almost out.
“I’ll go out and get some firewood.”
“Boister already did.”
Jan looked quickly about the cabin. Boister was nowhere in sight. He sprang to his feet and grabbed his heavy blanket coat.
“How long has he been gone?”
“Since we ate breakfast.”
Gladys was gone, too. Maybe nothing was wrong. Gladys could lead him back to the cabin. Jan wrapped a scarf around his neck and pulled a knitted cap down over his ears. He opened the door to the blaring light of sun on mountain snow.
He hurried around the corner, kicked the snow off a couple of smaller logs and brought them in. Repeating the process several times, he soon had the fire blazing.
“Mari, I have to leave you in charge of Evie and Tildie. Keep Evie away from the fire. If Tildie wakes up, give her some water and a biscuit to chew on.” The little girl nodded solemnly. Jan kissed her good-bye on the forehead and ruffled her hair. He gave Evie a quick peck and looked one last time at Tildie.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He opened the door and plunged into the deep snow, following the tracks left by Boister and Gladys.
No new snowfall obscured their tracks into the woods. With Jan’s long stride reaching over the heavy snow, he quickly covered the territory Boister had plowed through in his meandering.
When Jan found Boister, he had the strong urge to yank him up by the back of his pants and blister him good. All manner of disasters had plagued his thoughts as possible explanations for the boy not returning.
Boister and Gladys lay in the snow, scrutinizing the most makeshift rabbit trap Jan had ever seen. Built with the Indian snare in mind, it had some imaginative white boy innovations that would not have held a weak, blind rabbit for the time it took it to turn around, but boy and dog were entranced with the contraption.
Jan did nothing to cover the sound of his approach and Boister and Gladys turned eagerly to greet him, jumping up to run to him.
“Look, Jan,” Boister pointed to his trap. “If we wait awhile, we’ll have rabbit stew for dinner. I thought some rabbit meat would make Tildie feel better. You know, give her the broth.”
“That’s a good idea, son, but I need you back at the cabin. We’ll hunt up some meat for dinner for sure. Come on, now. Tildie’s better, and if she wakes to find us gone, she’ll be worried.”
Boister abandoned his trap immediately. “I was gathering twigs for kindling and then I got to thinking how they would bend and make a trap. It’s not exactly how White Feather taught me, but…” He looked over his shoulder at the trap. “Can we check it tomorrow? Or should we take it apart? I don’t want a rabbit to get stuck in it and die if we aren’t going to eat it.”
Jan didn’t have the heart to tell him the first stiff wind would collapse the contraption, so he shrugged. “We’ll check it tomorrow.”
They went back to the house to find Tildie still asleep and the girls playing their never-ending game of putting dolls to bed, waking them up to feed them, and putting them back to bed.
In the evening, Tildie awoke. She sipped on venison broth, courtesy of Jan’s afternoon hunt. The next day, she sat up on her bed. A few days later, she sat in a chair.
“Jan, these children smell,” she said, wrinkling her nose over Evie’s shorn head.
Jan looked up from the snare he was helping Boister craft. His head shook slightly from side to side in bewilderment.
“Didn’t your mother make all twelve of your sisters and brothers take a bath from time to time?” Tildie’s eyebrows arched over her eyes.
“Yes, but we had a tub and towels and something beside old lye soap.”
“Jan, you and I stink as well.”
“What do you propose we do about it?”
“We’ll give the children a standing bath.”
“A standing bath?”
“We need two pails.”
Jan looked over at the area beside the fireplace where he put together his food. He wouldn’t exactly call it a kitchen, but it had a pretty good-sized kettle. His mind wandered over his meager possessions.
“There’s a bucket I use to feed the horses.”
Tildie looked toward the stable end of the cabin. In an economy of heating, it attached to the house with only a half wall between the main room and the stalls. The children thought this was marvelous and visited with the horses regularly.
Jan explained that the heat of the horses’ bodies helped warm the cabin, and in the dead of winter, he didn’t have to worry about them being in a drafty stable freezing to death. Of course, the stable room had originally been built for a horse and a pack mule, but the three new tenants were comfortable, if crowded.
“What became of the original tenants?” Tildie had asked.
“Traded them.”
“For what?”
“Books.”
“Books?”
He shrugged. “Winter before last, I read to the animals every book I owned two or thr
ee times each. Gladys and I don’t mind walking. We didn’t really need the horse and mule once we were settled in.
“Gladys is good company during the winter months, but the books truly were better companions than the horses, and I didn’t have to feed them every day and clean out their stalls.”
Boister laughed. He threw back his head and laughed. The girls looked up in surprise, and they laughed too, more to be joining in the merriment than realizing what had struck their big brother as funny. Tildie who had never seen her cousin laugh, smiled with tears in her eyes. Gladys began to bounce around him and added her bark to the hullabaloo. Jan swept down on the boy and tickled him until Boister begged him to stop. Mari and Evie joined in by tackling Jan and claiming they could save their brother.
Eventually the fun subsided, and the four lay in mock exhaustion on the floor.
“I haven’t forgotten the baths,” said Tildie.
“Our babies need a bath, too.” Mari reached out to rescue her doll, which had been carelessly thrown aside.
Evie bobbed her head in agreement and crawled over to where her doll lay upside down against the wall.
“So does Gladys, Tildie,” pointed out Boister.
Jan drew the line at the dog. “Only humans are getting bathed this winter,” he declared.
Mari’s lower lip came out in a pout. “Sarah is ‘uman.” She squeezed her beloved playmate.
Jan looked to Tildie for advice.
“The dollies can take a bath with you. Just hold on to them, and they’ll get plenty clean.” She hoped this would suffice. It was going to be a chore just washing bodies and clothes.
They heated the water in the kettle, then they stripped down Evie first, standing her in the horses’ feed bucket. With Tildie’s supervision from her chair, Mari and Jan wet down the giggling girl, soaped her up, and sponged her off. She was wrapped in a large piece of blanket and relegated to Tildie’s lap while the process was repeated for Marilyn.
As long as Evie did not wiggle too much, Tildie enjoyed having her in her lap. The little girl settled quietly, with only a reminder that too much bouncing hurt her cousin.
The Brides of the Old West: Five Romantic Adventures from the American Frontier Page 74
