Virgin River

by Richard S. Wheeler

  He heard Enoch Bright quietly explaining things to Skye; heard him command that preparations for travel be halted. Then Hiram slipped through river brush, scaring up redwinged blackbirds, and settled on a log beside the slow, tiny stream.

  Death had visited this bright morning.

  Emma, Raphael, Samantha. Sterling, his oldest, still lived but the youth’s lungs were daily under siege. As were his own lungs, he supposed, but there had been no further sign of trouble after the tiny spots of blood speckled his handkerchief for a few days. Everyone, every dear person in his household, was a victim of consumption. Would this cruel disease not let him alone? Would it take his surviving son too?

  Why now? Had it been the horror of the evening before? The horror of having armed men threatening them for the crime of being sick? Had her weakened body and spirit recoiled against that desperate confrontation when it seemed possible that the whole company of the sick might be massacred? The hardships of the road seemed to erode the decency of people. Those men with rifles were simply trying to defend themselves and their families and were so caught in their passion that they almost murdered innocents.

  There are things one never knows, and he could never know what stole the life of his girl. Maybe the child was all worn-out. That was the most fatal of all diseases, just being worn-out. He thought he would die someday of being worn-out.

  They would have to bury her in some shallow grave and head west once again. He had wanted more for her; he wanted to give her a chance. Had he done something foolhardy, taking them on this endless journey? No! In New Bed-ford they would have sunk, day by day, without hope, only to lie for an eternity in the family plot. But every hour of this trip they lived with hope! Even Ephraim, the neighbor boy who was the first to die, had been filled with hope until he perished near Fort Kearney. She had hope! Sterling still had hope! He himself had hope! He had bought her hope!

  He watched the morning bloom, the breezes pick up and rattle the sedges, and then he returned to camp. Enoch had settled Samantha on her grimy blue blanket, there on the yellow clay, and straightened her out and folded her thin arms over her chest and combed her hair. There were no caskets here, only a hasty hole in the earth and a blanket to cover her. Someday soon there would be nothing left, not flesh, not bones, not a stone at the head of her grave.

  Peacock knew he must take charge again. There was not time to grieve. Other frail lives depended on him.

  “We will carry on,” he said to those gaunt youths. “We will reach a place of healing.”

  He rummaged a spade from the supply wagon and headed toward a gentle bower that might be a fitting place. But his spade bounced off the hardpan. Enoch Bright showed up to help, but Peacock waved him off. This was his own task, and he would not share it. He moved closer to the creek and tried again, this time in a brushy place, but the sun had cracked and dried the gumbo clay, turning it to granite, and he made no progress there. A sweat was building in him, and his own weary lungs were laboring.

  Skye found him there, panting and leaning on his shovel.

  “Sir, I think we may have to carry your girl a way before we can find a proper place,” he said. “This isn’t a fitting place. It’s July, and the clay’s turned to cement.”

  “This is where she died; this is where …” He let it hang, and gulped air.

  “Yes, it is fitting,” Skye said.

  Victoria watched all this from a safe distance, and then approached.

  “Mister Peacock? Would you listen to some old Crow woman?”

  Peacock nodded and wiped sweat from his brow. He had been indescribably wearied by only a few minutes of banging that spade into the unyielding earth.

  Victoria settled herself in the grass, which evoked curiosity in Peacock.

  “My people, they do it another way,” she began. “When someone starts on the spirit road, they are on a long journey that takes them up through the stars where they walk on spirit moccasins.”

  Peacock could no longer stand. He settled in the grass beside her. Off a way, life in the camp seemed suspended, and faces were turned toward them.

  “We put our dead ones up in a tree, on a scaffold we build. That’s our burial.”

  “Well, now, I can’t even think of that. I want a proper Christian burial, Missus Skye.”

  She seemed almost to ignore him. “We wrap them tight in a robe or a blanket along with their spirit things, their medicine bundle, their bow and quiver, everything they need for their long journey. Then we lift them up, very gently, onto this platform we’ve lashed to a big tree, and sit beneath the tree awhile saying goodbye to the one whose name we must never speak again, for this person is on the spirit road.

  “So we give this person not to the cold earth, but to the sun and the wind, the dews of night, the stars above, and the moon. We give this person to the blistering heat of summer, and the north winds of winter; to the rains of spring and fall, and the showers of summer, and the snows that settle over that robe and bury it in cold. So this person returns to the seasons, the air and wind, and sometime, long time maybe, these fall down and this person returns to dust, and becomes part of the earth again. Maybe this is good, eh?”

  They sat there in the breeze-tossed grass, there beside LaBonte Creek. He couldn’t say yes to this; he just couldn’t. It wasn’t the way he had lived and believed. And yet …

  He stood, slowly, his aching lungs recovered for the moment, and lumbered slowly toward the sagging wagon, found the axe, returned with it, eyed some cottonwood saplings, and began to hew one down.

  “You rest, sir,” Mister Skye said, materializing at his side.

  “I must do this. I’ll let you do it in a minute. Or Mister Bright. The man is a genius with wood, you know. But let me cut this first sapling. It’s my task, this first one.”

  Peacock soon felled a slim sapling, and carefully limbed it, and it felt right to do that. Then he handed the axe to Skye and settled on the ground to watch.

  Swiftly Skye felled saplings while Victoria limbed them with her hatchet, and soon a platform grew in a majestic cottonwood whose limbs spread wide. Pole after pole was readied and lashed into the platform, until at last an open-air casket, its bottom wooden, its top the leaves above and the dome of heaven over that, was readied.

  Peacock watched Victoria kneel beside the quiet body of Samantha, and realized the danger.

  “Madam, no, don’t risk your life,” he said. “I will prepare her.”

  She looked up at him. “I am safe. We believe that when the breath is gone, the sickness is no longer there. Is there anything you wish to send to the spirit land with her?”

  He thought of poor Samantha’s small possessions, and remembered Emma’s ring. Samantha’s mother had given her a thin silver ring. “Yes, I’ll get something for her to take with her.”

  He found Samantha’s little bundle in the cart, found the ring, and brought it. Victoria ran it through a thong and tied the thong around the girl’s neck.

  “Samantha, this is for the husband and marriage you never had,” he said.

  “That is a good gift,” Victoria said, straightening the girl’s collar.

  Then she drew the old blanket over Samantha and began a detailed binding, wrapping thong around and around, until Samantha had been encased.

  “I will lift her,” Peacock said.

  Skye looked about to offer help, but this was something the merchant needed to do himself. The girl weighed nothing. She had shrunk to seventy pounds or so, and he found himself gently carrying the blue-blanketed form toward the great and comforting cottonwood, and then lifting her above his head and sliding her onto the poles.

  Again he gestured Skye off, and worked Samantha’s body around until it lay straight and true on its resting place.

  The others materialized then, unbidden but knowing. Bright carried the Book. Skye summoned Victoria and they stepped back. Let the sick ones, the family and friends, gather close.

  Peacock watched Skye and Victoria ret
reat, watched Mary and the child in the cradleboard join them perhaps thirty yards distant, and then Bright was ready.

  “We have gathered here this hour to say good-bye to Samantha and wish her a good journey on her walk to the stars,” Bright said.

  Peacock stared, astonished.

  “She will walk among the constellations, pass by the Big Dipper, and come to the North Star, that unmoving beacon in the heavens by which we set our compass and measure our progress through life. She will find others on the star-trail, maybe new friends like these who have guided us. She will not be alone as she walks. Someday she will become a bright star and we all will know which one, and see how she shines,” Mister Bright said.

  Hiram Peacock had never heard such a funeral oration, and listened to Enoch Bright sing a song as ancient as the wind.

  fourteen

  They rolled west that afternoon, and encountered few trains. The overburdened oxen required frequent rests, and during these interludes other companies passed them by. Yet there was none of the fear or dread in these trains that had oozed from the earlier ones. They waved cheerfully in passing, or one of their number paused to visit, exchange news, and learn what might lie ahead.

  Skye reasoned that these later trains never got word, and didn’t know about the consumptives. News did travel back and forth among the various wagon outfits nearby, but the New Bedford Company had fallen well behind the ones that had left Fort Laramie about the same time.

  And something else: it was now very late to reach either California or Oregon. Any train that had come only this far west faced brutal Sierra snows or harsh Oregon winter. So these were stragglers, people slowed by problems like the Massachusetts company.

  Still, there was trouble brewing. The weary livestock could not drag the wagon and cart much farther. Not even harnessing the remaining Morgan to help drag the wagon up hills helped. And there was more.

  “Mister Skye, sir, we’ve been so slowed down that our larder is diminishing sadly. It’s taking many more days than I was advised to prepare for.”

  “Then we’ll have to go on half rations, Mister Peacock. If you’re hoping we can hunt our way west, don’t think it. There isn’t a deer or antelope closer than ten miles each side of this road, if that.”

  “I take it we’re still a month from Salt Lake,” Peacock said.

  “At least that. More if the livestock give out. But Bridger′s Fort isn’t so far.”

  Other companies passed by, and Skye took to bargaining with them. He offered the Sharps rifle for a span of oxen, but he got nowhere at all. One Tennessee captain, who seemed to know a thing or two, summed it up:

  “Sirrah, you ain’t get your head straight you think you can get livestock for that piece of steel. Oxen, they’re the gold out heah. They’s none. You have to get to Salt Lake to get oxen. The Mormons, they fatten them up. Soon as some train or other cuts wore-out oxen loose, the Saints git ′em and drive’em down there to Deseret and put the feed to’em. But they don’t come cheap. No sirree. You’d better git ready to cut off an arm or a leg to buy a span of good fat oxen.”

  Then an apparition appeared. Two wagons, each drawn by six mules, racing west at a fast clip, the jingles on their collars singing a merry tune.

  Skye intercepted them. He drew Jawbone alongside the lead wagon, where a gent with a battered straw hat and a corncob pipe and a tuft of beard held the lines, and his plump wife sat beside him.

  “Mister Skye here, sir. I’m looking for livestock.”

  “Happy Mikaelsen here, my friend, and this is my little woman, Marletta. Now, I’m fresh out of livestock.”

  “But you’re trailing a pair of mules behind the other wagon.”

  “Those are rotator mules, Mister Skye. There’s always two mules hoofing it loose behind. Every couple hours, they go back into the collars and two more lucky cusses get to waltz a while.”

  “We need them and would buy them.”

  “Whole world needs’em. No, Mister Skye.”

  “They’re fat; how do you do that?”

  “Oats. I says to the missus, we’ll take oats and nothing more. Oats are a two-gaited chow, good for animals, or good for gruel. We got two boys to feed, and they get gruel. We got stock ain’t getting much grass, so they get oats.”

  “But you’ll run out soon,” Skye said.

  “Not until we hit the Columbia, and then those wagon beds turn into flatboats, and we’re home.”

  “Over the falls?”

  “They’ve got Injun porters, we’re told. Portage around the falls. They get the mules for pay. Probably eat the whole lot for dinner.”

  Skye saw how this would go, and laughed. The muledrawn wagons jingled ahead and were soon out of sight.

  Skye slowed Jawbone and drifted back to his own lumbering company.

  “No luck, Mister Peacock. I think you’d better plan on abandoning that wagon.”

  “We can’t! That’s the hospital. It’s lighter than any cart on this road. Bright built it, hickory, ash, the planks planed down, the spokes lathed down, everything light as a spiderweb.”

  Skye saw how it would go. “All along this road we’ve seen discards, chests of drawers, trundle beds, trunks, tools, harness, anything to save weight. You’ll need to throw out everything you can throw out before the oxen give in.”

  Peacock eyed Skye sharply. This was a familiar decision, a decision every company heading west had to face.

  “I must do whatever is required for the sick, Mister Skye,” Peacock said.

  “Think on it,” Skye said.

  The North Platte oxbowed through arid flats carpeted with sage. These baked in the heat of July, making the air close and hard to breathe. Skye wondered how those young people could breathe when even healthy people found the hazy air unsatisfying. There were gnats and flies now, sometimes swarming over these helpless passengers who either lay in the cart or sat stoically on the tailgate of the wagon. A thunderhead built in the west, lost in white haze. Skye felt sweat pool under his arms and evaporate in the brutal dry.

  Still they rolled west. The weary oxen plodded through thick powder, step by step, dragging the wagons behind them, slavering from open mouths, their tongues white and caked with clay. Bright was rotating the oxen, changing wheelers and leaders to even the load. But not even his careful management was keeping these overworked animals from sliding into exhaustion.

  They halted at dusk at a place that had not seen an immigrant camp and had a little miserable grass poking from under the sagebrush. It lacked firewood but Skye thought he and his women might collect enough debris for a small quick fire. No other heat would be needed that evening when the heat lingered in every rock and the clay itself, and no fresh breeze brought the slightest relief.

  His women did not raise the lodge; not a cloud lowered over them, and only the thunderheads over distant mountains even hinted at the possibility of rain. Skye didn’t like the place. It seemed naked and defenseless. But he had, over a lifetime lived out-of-doors, ended up on thousands of such spots, alien and mean, but all that could be bought from the natural world before dark.

  The youngsters who could walk headed for the river to wash away the miserable grit that caked their hair and faces and clothing. Skye watched them wend their breathless way to the bank, slide down to the much-diminished river, and hesitantly try to clean themselves. The Bridge sisters did it best, bravely splashing the murky water over themselves. Peter Sturgeon seemed worst. He slumped at the bank and stared into the turbid water, too exhausted to do his toilet. Anna Bennett, always one to do things her own way, stood at the stream bank and did nothing, and Skye intuited that she would perform her ablutions in the cloak of darkness.

  Skye unsaddled Jawbone and led him down to the river and straight into it. Jawbone felt his way toward the middle, where current tugged at his hocks, and then slowly capsized until the water roiled over his back and neck, driving gnats and flies out of the mane. Jawbone, at least, knew how to deal with this oppressive heat
. Eventually the great blue roan stood, shook, splashed to shore, and shook himself again, scattering a pleasant rain over Skye, who laughed. Jawbone snorted and bared his teeth in triumph.

  Mary unlaced North Star from his cradleboard, cleaned his bottom with fragrant sage leaves, and let the child stretch on a buffalo robe, free at last from the binding that had pinned him for hours. Then she nursed him quietly, her gaze first on Skye, then on her boy, and there was a small tender smile on her face.

  The oxen drank, stood quietly in the water, their tails switching at flies, and then lumbered up to graze on the flat, their big snouts poking under the sagebrush to snap at grasses there. Skye’s ponies spread out, ruthlessly tugging grass from the thickest sagebrush, somehow finding grass hiding under the prickly sage that most domestic animals would miss or ignore. The whirling flies and gnats and mosquitoes were terrible, pestering the horses as well as the whole company, but there was little anyone could do except dip neck-deep into the river.

  A distant wagon train rolled by on the trail, not stopping to turn off at this unlikely place, but Skye could see that these people were curious about what fools might camp where there was no wood and so little grass, at least to the untrained eye.

  Victoria watched them hurry on.

  “They are all in such a hurry. What will they do when they get there? They will turn themselves into slaves. Dammit, Mister Skye, you belong to a mad people.”

  “We live in the future; you live in the present,” he said. “They dream of gold.”

  But she was drawing lodgepoles out of the bundles they carried.

  “I will make a travois for my pony, and I will walk,” she said.

  Skye nodded. There were no lodgepoles here and no place up the trail to cut them. If she began building travois, they could no longer raise their lodge. But it had to be done. A travois for her pony, another for the Morgan horse that Bright was using on upgrades, and the wagon could be lightened.