Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Row?” Amanda whispered.

  “We gonna just sit here and watch him die?” Burwell spewed suddenly, his face flushed red with fury.

  Amanda glanced quickly at her father, then said, “Row, he needs you now.”

  Closing his eyes, Burwell wagged his head. “I-I don’t think I can sit here with ’im, Amanda—”

  “Pa—Pa.”

  Roman Burwell immediately collapsed to his knees there on the pallet with that pitiful groan from his son’s lips. As tears started welling from the farmer’s eyes, he scooped up Lucas’s hand between both of his. How small and white it looked to Titus now, lying there, protected between the father’s big, strong, hard-boned paws. How small and frail and helpless too.

  Anyone close to that awning now, in the death-still quiet that held its grip on family and friends and fellow sojourners on this road to Oregon, could plainly make out how the boy’s breathing came harder and harder over the next excruciating minutes. Almost as if he were struggling to breathe under water. Short, shallow breaths—each successive one seeming to come quicker and quicker, as if the child would never again catch his breath. And with these last few moments came that pale bluish hue of impending death, its once-seen-never-to-be-forgotten color smeared beneath the tiny youngster’s eyes. How many times in all his living had Titus Bass witnessed that sheen paint its fateful crescent there against pale skin.

  Grinding his teeth together the old trapper had gotten to his feet, feeling more weary than he could ever remember being. Without a word he turned away from the awning, his muscles tensed as he hurried on this vital errand to beg of Shadrach what he himself could not do.

  At the front of the wagon he now spotted Sweete and Shell Woman. Lunging over the wagon tongue, Bass grabbed the Cheyenne by her shoulders and shook her, bringing her frightened face close to his when he snarled, “You gotta help that boy! Go put your hands on ’im, sing your prayers! Do what you gotta do to save him—”

  “Scratch!” Sweete whispered as he jabbed an arm down between Toote and the old trapper, tugging them apart.

  He looked up at his tall friend, desperation growing, a plea in his eyes, and in his voice, “You gotta tell ’er to come say her magic words, come help Lucas, Shadrach. For the love of all that’s holy—she can heal ’im.”

  “I told you afore—the Cheyenne don’t have no medicine strong enough.”

  The despair was growing, more than palpable in the pit of his belly. “How come she saved you … an’ she won’t save that boy?”

  “Ain’t that at all,” Sweete said soothingly. Gradually he got Bass’s hands pried from Shell Woman’s arms and got his friend turned aside.

  “You gotta make her save Lucas same way she saved you—”

  Sweete suddenly shook the smaller man. “Goddammit! It’s different, Scratch.”

  He stared at his friend’s eyes and asked, “How?”

  Taking a long sigh, Shad explained, “Because when she healed my arm with her white buffler medicine … there wasn’t no spirit fighting her prayers.”

  Bass squinted his eyes, attempting to get his mind around what he had just been told. “N-no spirit fightin’ her prayers?”

  “All she had to do was stop that real bad bleedin’, an’ I was healed,” Sweete declared.

  “What’s differ’nt here with that boy Lucas?”

  Letting go of Titus, Shad said, “Toote told me the Cheyenne’s white buffler medicine ain’t no good fighting against a bad spirit.”

  For a long, long time he stared into the tall man’s face. “The snake … it’s a bad spirit she can’t fight with her medeecin?”

  “I … I’m real sorry, Scratch.”

  He looked at Shell Woman now, feeling so hollow and dry, like everything good had been sucked right out of him. “I’m sorry too. Tell ’er, Shad. Tell ’er I’m sorry I grabbed ’er, if’n I hurt her—”

  “Ti-tuzz,” Waits whispered behind him.

  Turning, he found his wife standing at the corner of the wagon, holding a small brass kettle, steam rising from its surface in the full blast of summer’s hottest fury. In her other hand she held what looked to be a wet towel.

  “What you made—will it help?” he asked her in Crow.

  Her eyes already spoke their grim answer for him. Then she said, “No, but I made it from a root that will make it easier … his last journey … for him.”

  Bass could see how hard it was for her to stand there without sobbing, without breaking down herself. After all she was a mother too, a woman carrying her baby in her belly right then … experiencing an unimaginable grief just in watching another mother hold her baby in her arms as that child lay dying. He took the kettle’s bail from her and carried it around the front of the wagon to set it beside Amanda. Magpie followed with her mother, leaning in to hand the white woman a spoon, then stepped back into that fringe of stunned onlookers.

  Amanda looked up at Bass and his wife, asking, “What is it?”

  “Waits made it. Maybeso it’s gonna help … help Lucas so he don’t hurt so much.”

  Her eyes bounced back and forth between them for a moment, then she said, “If it will make his going easier, Pa.”

  While Amanda raised Lucas up again and held a spoonful of the steamy broth against his lips, Titus knelt on the other side of the child, by the lower leg that was already blackening with an impatient death rising inexorably from the wound. Unwrapping the wet towel Waits handed down to him, Titus found inside a mash of roots and leaves. This dripping pulp he scooped up with his fingers and laid against the wounds, knowing the boy’s flesh was dying, if not already dead, the flesh darkening the way it was, those wound sites seeping a foul ooze. Lucas did not move the leg as Scratch wrapped the wet towel over the poultice.

  After a half dozen sips of the steamy broth, Lucas barely managed to turn his head before his stomach revolted and emptied itself. As he watched his daughter, Scratch saw how Amanda positioned herself, refusing to look below her child’s waist anymore, to look at the snakebite, at the bloated, blackening leg. Instead, she kept her eyes only on Lucas’s face as she stroked his tiny arm and gently rocked the boy. Her tears spilled one by one onto the child’s pale, dusty shirt, each drop making its own muddy circle on the much-faded cloth.

  Titus turned at the rustle and murmur behind him, watching Hoyt Bingham come through the crowd with a green bottle in his hand. The train’s other captain knelt just inside the late-afternoon shade of the awning and held out the bottle to Roman.

  “May—maybe some whiskey help it,” the man offered.

  Roman nodded to Titus, and Bingham shifted his offering to Bass. For a long moment he stared at that bottle in the settler’s hand, an old hunger raising its head in the pit of him—the sort of hunger that came when there was nothing else to do but numb a pain with the forgetfulness of liquor … then he looked at Bingham’s face again and those eyes pleading that he could find some way to help. At last Scratch looked down at how Roman held his son’s tiny hand, not thinking that offer of whiskey was such a fine idea after all.

  “Maybeso later,” Titus said softly. “Likely … we could sure use that whiskey … a little later. Thankee most kindly.”

  Again and again Waits and Toote brought steaming rags in a brass kettle, rags he held over the soupy poultice. Changing the rag that had cooled off for a hot one as the crowd around them breathed but did not mutter a word. Maybe they were all talked out for now. Nothing more to say. No words that could make any difference. Maybe not even prayer words. So he glanced up at those vacant eyes in those dusty faces here beside the Soda Springs where the small geyser spewed at that moment with a watery gush.

  He was helpless as any of them were, these emigrant farmers who had no earthly reason to be out here in his wilderness when they should be back in their hardwood forests, or on in their promised land on the Willamette River of Oregon Territory. Anywhere but here, an unnamed, unmapped hell of the country more than halfway between where they’d come from a
nd where they still dreamed of putting down new roots. Easy was it for Titus to read that despair on their faces. It could have been any child, their child, their youngest, the baby who would have grown up strong and bold in that far-off land of promise. But here they stood suspended in time and distance, much, much too far from their old homes to ever consider turning back for what was. Still too damn far from Oregon country to truly believe any of them could make it to that promised land without being forced to pay some terrible price for their wanting and hungering for it.

  Everything came with a price, Titus brooded. The wanting of that paradise on the Willamette … it had come with a hard, hard price for this little family.

  Was his wanting of a little paradise far, far to the north for his family going to come with some awful price as yet hidden beyond the horizon … somewhere out there where he could not see it coming, could not turn out of its way?

  So he peered up at Bingham and Ryder, Murray and Truell, Fenton and Iverson, and all those nameless ones who had stood up against the way of eastern men like Hargrove. Good, simple, hardworking men who sweated into the ground, bled on the soil to coax something green from it. Men who had already spent months and much more than a thousand miles learning what it was going to take to reach Oregon. Not just the anvil one of them had abandoned way back on the Kaw, or a sideboard already some five generations old left behind on the lower Platte. Maybe that clumsy, bulky grinding stone thrown out by the time the great shallow river split in two and they began to follow the road’s course as it northed to Laramie. Perhaps some heavy china that had belonged to a great-grandmother, now left carefully stacked and abandoned beneath a wind-stunted tree at the base of Chimney Rock. Treasures left behind for them that might appreciate what treasures they were, and what it had taken to leave them behind—forever.

  All of these sojourners had left something behind … even loved ones. Blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Each loss a supreme sacrifice paid on the altar of this wilderness crossing. A stillborn child laid to its rest in a tiny hole beside the Little Blue. Then the train’s first cholera victim, who awoke one bright, clear morning with nothing more than a headache, was taken feverish by midday, and at death’s door before the train stopped for the night. That woman wasn’t the last to be taken, Amanda had told her father as tears had pooled in her eyes several nights ago at their fire, when she had attempted to explain what sacrifices these emigrants had been making all along. Seventeen more had died, gripped by the cholera that chased them right out of the settlements, she declared, chased by that scourge until they finally outran it somewhere close to Courthouse Rock on the North Platte. No more graves after that one they dug for the husband and father who had stumbled clambering out of his wagon, dropping his loaded rifle, and shot himself under the chin. He had been the last one of these Oregon-bound sojourners they had buried on the way. …

  At least until this day. Why the babes and the youngest among them? He sat there in the coming twilight, asking this troubling question of that great, still being he was just beginning to trust. Why this little Lucas?

  As dusk deepened about them, someone brought three lamps, and though a few left, going back to stir up fires and put supper on the boil, Titus was surprised that most of these people ended up staying on in silence. A watch, he thought. A wake they were making of the boy’s slow, fitful death, but nothing noisy in the slightest. No, these were the sort of people who were standing out there in the gathering clot of night, wondering on this happenstance, thanking their capricious God that it hadn’t been one of their happy, laughing, carefree children who had been sacrificed to this camping ground at Soda Springs. These simple folks with simple dreams and simple prayers, standing there on the edge of the fire’s glow or lamplight four or five deep, watching without a murmur, trying to grasp onto some sense of how it must feel to be Roman or Amanda Burwell right now.

  Every one of these sojourners sure to sense how the journey had just taken its heaviest toll, its tithe, its blood sacrifice from this little family. Perhaps praying—they were wondering if they would make it the next thousand miles or so to the Willamette without being required to make a flesh-and-bone sacrifice of their own to this life-altering journey. Secretly in their heart of hearts offering thanks to their God that it was someone else who had paid and not them.

  So Titus brooded darkly on what kind of prayer-maker it would take to thank their God for taking some other person’s child. How goddamned holy did that make them, even if they invoked the Almighty’s name and His spirit? All these simple people inching west toward the setting sun, brazenly believing they were only moving from one old home to a new home … with only a matter of some miles and months in between. Stupid, simple people, he cursed them—thinking of this march across the prairie, onto the High Plains, and over the mountains, fording powerful rivers, fighting off the cold and dust and bugs and water scrapes too … who were these people to stand out there in the dark and pray to their God, a God who hadn’t done a damned thing to help save the life of this small, happy, towheaded helpless boy who’d never done a thing to hurt anybody and was just coming to know his grandpapa? Who were these people to judge anyway?

  “P-Pa?”

  He turned at Amanda’s weak, raspy call, found her leaning over Lucas. “Hol’t that light up for me, Roman.”

  Burwell raised the lantern, its oil sloshing in the brass well as the farmer held it above them all, creating stabs of shadow and light in a half circle. Titus bent close, hoping—perhaps praying—to feel the soft brush of breath on his cheek as he stared at Lucas’s face. A thick and greenish ooze seeped out from the corner of the boy’s crusted nostril.

  Titus stifled a sob, thinking, The p’isen has riz clear to the child’s head now.

  Which meant Lucas was near gone. Sweet mercy. Sweet, blessed mercy—the roots in that broth Waits prepared had given the child a little peace as he slipped into the hardest part of his passing. Mayhaps the soup had eased the boy’s pain, because Lucas hadn’t fussed after that one time telling his mama that he hurt so bad all over. Titus could only hope as Roman raised the lantern.

  “Keep hol’t of him, you two,” he whispered, his voice cracking and the tears starting to stream there in the dark. “Here, put your hand there, Roman. An’ you’ll be sartin to feel … feel when he’s … took his last air.”

  When he got the words said, the breath caught in Amanda’s throat. But she let him lift her trembling hand and lay it on her boy’s chest, right there beside Roman’s. This little boy, so short on earthly days, now passing on, cradled here in the arms of his pap and mam.

  Every now and then, he could hear Amanda’s gut-wrenching wail.

  It made the hair stand on the back of Scratch’s neck.

  But he gritted his teeth, swabbed the raw end of his nose, and kept on digging.

  “Ain’t it deep enough yet, Mr. Bass?” asked Hoyt Bingham as he stood on the rim of that grave they had begun gouging out of the hard, flintlike ground forty yards south of the Burwell wagon. Yonder aways on their back trail coming to Soda Springs.

  “We’re goin’ down far as it takes to keep that boy from gettin’ dug up.”

  He watched how the dozen or so men on the rim of the grave looked at one another, then stared into the dark, the light from four lanterns positioned on the ground at their feet radiating upward to illuminate only the lower half of their faces, that soft light causing everything from their cheekbones up to disappear in shadow.

  “Dug up?” one of the sodbusters asked.

  “Wolves.” Titus plunged the shovel into the ground and scraped it forward in the dark. He was working by feel now. The light from those lanterns no longer reached the bottom of the short rectangle just big enough for one man to turn around in. Dark at the bottom where the old man sweated as he pried loose more and more of the dirt he wanted to lay on top of that little boy’s body.

  “Maybe you been in there long enough.”

  He recog
nized Sweete’s voice and looked up. “I ain’t tired, Shadrach.”

  Sweete went to one knee beside the grave and gazed down at him with his own red eyes. “I know you ain’t, Titus. Just—I wanted to have a hand in digging some of this grave too.”

  For a moment he stared up at his friend’s long, sad face. Then nodded. “I’ll leave the shovel down in the hole for you.”

  Shad reached out with his long arm and seized Bass’s wrist, boosting him up to the prairie just as the dozen others nervously stepped aside at the rustle of footsteps coming through the sagebrush. Into the gentle yellow glow of those lanterns stepped a big shadow, followed by those two Indian dogs that had kept a long vigil over the boy’s last hours. Roman stopped within their silent circle, swallowed deep, and arched back his shoulders. An hour ago Titus wouldn’t have put money on Burwell ever rising from that foul-smelling pallet again. He had looked as defeated as any man could be, his shoulders hunched over, quaking as he held Amanda, who was holding Lucas. Rocking them both: his dead, towheaded boy and that grieving, wailing mother. Moaning as he rocked them both in the cradle of his arms. Rocking and moaning with some wordless pain leaching out of his pores the way a clay pitcher sweats in the summer. Slow, so slow, drop by drop—that pain leaching out of him so slow.

  The sight of the three had been more than Titus could take. He had to do something with his own private grief. So he had tramped off into the dark, where Waits eventually found him, held her husband as he cried in silence, not daring to allow the wounded animal that was shrieking inside him to have its voice just yet. And when he sensed that he had it all shaken out for the moment, she dried his tears with the wide sleeve of her calico dress and he had walked back into the light with her. Pulling out that shovel Roman kept in the possum belly slung beneath the wagon, he had grabbed up one of those lanterns brought to the death watch and stepped into the dark alone.

  Come tomorrow morning when the rest of them were gone over the horizon and nothing was left of the train but a dusty smudge in the sky, he would remain here on the back trail and hide the grave. Build a big damn fire to kill the scent. Turn a few inches of topsoil after the limbs had gone to embers. And no wolf, no coyote, no poor Digger son of a bitch would ever know his grandson was buried there. Blood of his blood, bone of his bone, left there to rest in peace in this nameless, unmarked corner of the wilderness between what had been and what was to be.