“What’s that?” Roman asked the moment he dropped into the hole and the racket of hammers arose out of the silence of that chill, desert night like a disembodied poltergeist. Rhythmic, hauntingly rhythmic.
“I give Rankin and Winston two of those wood boxes my ship’s biscuits come in,” Bingham explained to his friend, who stared up at the eerie lamplight on their faces from the bottom of the hole. “Goodell had him two more.”
“Ship’s biscuits?” Burwell repeated, not understanding.
Bingham bit his lower lip a minute, then continued. “We figured it was the best thing we could come up with for a box, Row.”
“A box for my … my … for him?”
“Yes, we’re makin’ him a coffin,” Iverson said. “Winston took one side outta each box and they was laying ’em together, nailing ’em into a real nice coffin, Row.”
Ammons nodded his head, “It’s gonna work out real nice, Row—ain’t nothing gonna get in to your boy.”
Then they all saw how that image slapped Roman across the jaw as hard as a hickory-boned fist. His eyes scrunched up and his chin started to quake. Then it wasn’t but a heartbeat before that tremble started to work its way down through the rest of him until he was shaking as he stood in that dark hole. Slowly he sank down the long handle of that farmer’s shovel, gripping it for support until he landed at the bottom of the small hole with a grunt … and began to moan once more.
“Row,” Bingham pleaded as he leaned over the edge of the grave.
But Titus pulled the man back and knelt so he could look down on the grieving father. “Son, whyn’t you come on out now an’ lemme finish this up for the boy,” he said quietly, his voice having a hint of an echo as the words fell into the hollow grave.
“That you, Titus?”
“It’s me.”
Roman’s words drifted up from the dark, weak and plaintive, “How’s a man, a man ever s’posed to bear up under this?”
At first he swallowed, then said, “I ain’t for sure, Roman. Can’t claim to ever goin’ through what’s eatin’ a hole away at your heart right now. Fierce as my own heart screams in pain right now, I don’t have no idee how yours must be.”
“It’s like my legs won’t stand when I think of … of him.”
“But, you’re gonna have to stand, Roman,” Titus explained. “Amanda gonna be countin’ on you for that. Hold her up when it comes time we gotta put that li’l body down in this hole.”
“I-I don’t—”
“What about them other’ns? Three of the most likely young’uns a pa would ever want to light up his life. What about them three, Roman?”
“I didn’t figure on—”
“You tell me, son—would your boy, Lucas, want you an’ his mama to give up an’ die right here when you’re so close to where you was takin’ him?”
“Don’t have no way of knowing—”
“Lucas wants his folks to carry on,” Titus advised. “Lucas wants you both to be strong for each other. Say your words over his buryin’ spot. Then wipe your tears an’ get on down the trail another day.”
“L-leave him here?”
“Yes,” he whispered it. “You gonna leave the boy’s body behind, right here. Just like he left his body behind his own self a li’l while ago.”
“Then what, Titus?”
“You go on to get up next mornin’, an’ the mornin’ after that, and you take your family on to Oregon—”
“W-without him?” he shrieked in misery.
Scratch shuffled at the edge of the pit, stretching out on his belly so he could reach down with one hand, lay it on Roman’s trembling shoulder. “No, you an’ Amanda won’t never be ’thout young Lucas again. He’ll allays be with you, ever’ mile of the way to that new land in Oregon. Lucas allays be young, just like you ’member him.”
“It’s gonna hurt like the devil to remember him.”
“But you will … ’cause Lucas wants you to,” Titus said softly. “You go carry Lucas’s memory with you day by day now. ’Cause he’ll be right there with you on ever’ mile you put behin’t you from sunup to sundown. Lucas goin’ to finish this journey to Oregon with you an’ Amanda.”
It took a moment, but they heard the muted shuffling of the big farmer’s boots on the flaky soil at the bottom of the hole. Then his head came into the light as he stood, his face upturned, long muddy streaks coursing down each of his cheeks. Red eyes he turned up now to Titus.
“You don’t mind me doing the rest by myself, friends,” he told all of them quietly as his eyes touched their lamplit faces. “I got a grave to finish for my son.”
EIGHTEEN
He had helped Roman lay that little body in its coffin cobbled together from those wooden crates, just wide enough for the lad’s narrow shoulders. Long enough for those two legs: one thin and gangly, the other black and bloated with a serpent’s poison. A spare and bony body that so reminded Titus of the skinny tyke he himself had been at that age.
At the moment Lucas had breathed his last, Titus pulled a large flap of that old quilt over the boy’s disfigured leg. No one would ever have to look at the awful wounds again. Amanda made sure of that. She kept the boy wrapped from his chin on down, holding him in her lap there beneath the awning as the thin sliver of new moon rose, rocked across the horizon, then set in preparation for the coming of a gray dawn. Not until then did she wash his face, and only his face, with a scrap of burlap, then held Lucas against her breast so steadfastly Titus doubted they would be able to pry the body loose from her arms when it came time to consign the boy to the ground.
But she had given him up to Roman. With her face screwed up into an ugly picture of pure agony, she had bottled up the wail behind clenched teeth and allowed Roman to take the quilt-wrapped bundle from her … only that deathly pale face poking from one end of the blanket a mother-to-be had stitched for her youngest. On the far side of the wagon the friends had laid the box, its cover propped against a wagon wheel in the charcoal-hued light of that cold morning before the summer sun came to rewarm this high desert. Once her arms were empty, that’s when the women moved in—white women from the train, all of whom had stayed up through that long and sleepless night with Amanda—for this manner of grieving was something new to Waits and Toote. They stood back as the others swooped in to lay their hands on her, murmuring their prayers and wishes and condolences, brushing the matted hair back out of her face, bringing warm water in a china bowl to wash away the dust from her cheeks and the blood smeared on her hands, clean off that arm where her boy had spewed anything put into his belly.
From the bottom of a humpbacked sea chest, one of them brought out a black dress she had, not a formal mourning gown, but something that spoke a much simpler grief. It would do, most all of them assured her as they gathered round the grieving mother for cover and two of their number loosened every last tiny button from her bloodstained dress, slowly pulled it from her, then draped the black dress around her. They brushed and fixed her hair as they all listened to the dull, unanswered thud of that hammer driving one nail after another into the lid of that long, thin box they had cobbled together from the hard-biscuit crates.
Scratch looked around at the others, then handed the hammer to the one called Ryder with a nod of thanks. He found Roman still staring down at the box in that way of disbelief.
“You made him real comfortable, son,” Titus reassured. He swallowed hard and fought the quiver of his chin. Knowing his voice was about to crack, nonetheless he said, “The look on his face … Lucas was at peace, son. His hurtin’s over now.”
“You ready, Roman?” Iverson said as he stepped up, his old, scuffed Bible held in both hands at the center of his belly, as if protecting the buckle of a belt that wasn’t there.
Burwell nodded again, his eyes never rising from the lid of that long, narrow box.
Three of the others immediately stepped around Iverson and knelt beside the coffin, but before they barely had their arms around it, Titus and S
hadrach tapped on those emigrants’ shoulders and shooed them away. Together, without a word spoken, the two of them gently lifted the box and positioned it on their shoulders, on Scratch’s right as he stepped away in the front, and on Sweete’s left shoulder as he made his strides shorter, more deliberate—that much taller was he than Titus Bass.
“Bring them two coils of rope,” Scratch whispered to Bingham as he shuffled past.
A long gauntlet of men, children, and now the women too was forming on either side of the path the two old trappers were taking through the gray of first light to that deep, deep hole Titus had wanted to be half again as deep as he was tall. In the end, so deep that Shadrach had been the only one who could pull Burwell from the grave after Roman had passed up the shovel to them, then that empty bucket on the end of a one-inch line they used to drag out the dirt the grieving father tore up from the bottom of what would forever be Lucas’s resting place.
On his right just past the wagon tongue the crowd parted with a murmur, and through that gap stepped Roman, his right arm around Amanda’s shoulders, his left hand gripping her arm across her body, holding her up, making her move with him, slowly, taking small steps as they fell in behind the coffin. Behind them came Lemuel, Leah, and young Annie—the baby of the family now that Lucas was gone. Up ahead in the graying light, Bass saw the faces of his children appear at the side of the gauntlet of white folks, saw how they poked their heads out to watch.
“Popo,” Magpie whispered as he came near, one small step at a time, carrying the front of that coffin, “all right we come with you too?” Her words were respectful, filled with awe and a pain that hadn’t subsided since yesterday when she discovered the boy not long after the snake struck. She had one arm laid over Flea’s shoulder, her other arm holding up her smallest brother.
Jackrabbit looked frightened, confused, downright scared. Bass’s eyes softened as he quickly peered at the boy. “You come with me.”
They tore themselves away from the gauntlet as the coffin moved past, stepping into line at the end of the procession to join Annie, Leah, and Lemuel behind the sobbing parents.
And finally Iverson reached the hole where Titus had dug it, aways back from the trees and brush, in the open, where the trail from the east rolled through to this camping ground. In the open. Where a soul should be buried, he thought again. Not closed in by trees and rocks. And if it couldn’t be at the top of a hill, then … in the open.
Bingham and Goodell shuffled ahead of the trappers, getting to the grave right behind Iverson to quickly lay out just enough length from the two ropes on one side of the hole so the coffin could rest on top of the ropes for these last few minutes before the box would disappear from sight. As Scratch and Shadrach knelt and worked the narrow crate from their shoulders, Iverson began motioning to the more than two hundred who were crowding up, silently forming them around the site more than ten to a dozen deep. From the quiet throng, Carter emerged carrying a large cast-iron oven, the sort the women used to bake their breads, cakes, and biscuits in, when shoved beneath the ashes of a fire. As soon as the emigrant set it down, Scratch saw it was without its lid, filled with what he took to be ashes.
Waits-by-the-Water stepped through a knot of women and came to him silently, reaching his side to grip his hand and put her arm around him as they stood across the narrow hole from the grieving parents. Titus sensed just how lucky he was to have a good woman at his side through everything life could throw at a man.
Iverson held up that Bible much stained with sweat and grime, asking for quiet as Titus and Scratch stepped aside, allowing the family to approach the box. When the parents stopped, looking down at the coffin, Amanda drew herself up there in Roman’s arms. Then took a long, ragged sigh, and no longer sobbed or whimpered, but instead motioned with her free arm to the children, not just the three left her, but to her brothers and sister too: Magpie, Flea, and Jackrabbit.
“The rest of you children,” she said quietly an instant before Iverson started to speak, which compelled the man to stand there with his mouth in an O as her small voice made its presence felt on them all, “all you children who played with Lucas every night on the trail … I want you to come up to stand around his grave with us now.”
He must be the closest thing this band of sojourners had for a preacher, Titus thought as Iverson finally began a reading of this Scripture, then another, and still another. And when he finally closed that worn, brown-skinned Bible, Iverson held it against his chest and began speaking from his heart.
“Not one of us knows the why of the ways of the Lord,” he reminded them. “On our journey we’ve lost babes, and we’ve lost old ones too. It is the work and wonder of the Lord, so we are left to doubt or to believe. I … choose to believe.”
There was some quiet muttering from some of the women and a handful of the men as the heat of the coming day began to tell.
Iverson pitched in again. “Last night I heard the talk of people scared of what they had done in running from homes and family to find themselves in this wilderness where the innocent can be taken from us. So let me remind those of you who were gnashing your teeth—crying that this must be a curse because we chose to chance a journey to God’s garden. What took young Lucas was not the devil, or his evil serpent. It was only one of many dangers man finds in this wilderness. Do not despair—we will get through to our Garden of Eden!”
With that last word pronounced in a louder volume, Iverson held everyone’s rapt attention. Even the old trapper’s.
“Yea, last night in the darkest of hours there were those doubters who professed to know that our Oregon company had been cursed—cursed by Hargrove and his men; cursed by young Lucas’s terrible death. But, I tell you nay! Why—don’t you remember that we have lost some of our number all along the way?”
There arose a quiet, begrudging agreement from the many.
“No,” Iverson hammered on, “I will not go along with those of you who say that these deaths are because we left the Garden of Eden behind us. No, my friends—our garden lies before us, pulling us on.”
Titus had to admit, the man did have a gift for preachifying, the way he used an alternate rhythm or different tone to hold this crowd’s attention from one moment to the next.
“Oregon awaits us, my friends. This wilderness infested with serpents and bad water is only what we must endure to reach the land where the Lord is drawing us nigh. Do not let the devil convince your hearts that young Lucas paid a blood atonement … as some of you were saying in the dark. No. I want you to look now—yes … look and see how first light is coming!”
They turned almost as one and peered east along their back trail, from whence they had come, leaving most everything behind to go west.
“This is a new day for the Lord. We must complete God’s work and bury young Lucas, for his family, for us all. Then we must be on to Oregon.”
“Can we sing a song?” a woman asked from the crowd, plaintively.
“Yes,” Iverson answered, then immediately closed his eyes and launched into a song Titus could not remember ever hearing.
Some of the crowd knew the song too, and they joined in self-consciously by the middle of the first verse. But because the entire group had not added their voices, Iverson ended after the second verse.
“Friends, it is time to consign young Lucas Burwell to the ground.”
Roman caught Amanda as her knees turned to water. Steadying her against him, they watched four men step from the throng and pick up an end of the two ropes. Carefully they raised the coffin off the ground, then swung it over the hole and began to slowly lower it to the bottom. When it rested securely, two of the men pulled the ropes from the grave.
In the coming of day Iverson bent and scooped up a handful of the dry, dark earth piled next to that hole and tossed it down upon the top of that wooden box with a muffled clatter. “Dust to dust …”
Kneeling beside the cast-iron oven, Iverson seized a handful of the cold ashes he had aske
d be brought here. He opened his hand, allowing the flakes and dust to fall, most of them drifting into the hole.
“And ashes to ashes,” he reminded them. “From dust we come. To dust we all will go.”
Rubbing his palm against the leg of his pants, Iverson stepped back and made a quick gesture to Roman. Mr. and Mrs. Burwell knelt at the edge of the grave, where they each tossed in some dirt clods, landing hollow on the top of that crude coffin, then reached over to toss in some ashes. Roman got to his feet first, helping Amanda as they moved aside, and Lemuel brought his two sisters forward. At the side of the grave, Lemuel turned, signaling Magpie and her brothers to join them. All bent and made their offerings to the grave.
And as the children inched back, Iverson said, “Anyone who wants to come to the graveside, offer a prayer by throwing in some dirt or ashes—now is the time.”
They shuffled around the small hole, long lines of silent folk coming from two directions. As they finished, then passed by, most every one of these emigrants reached out to touch Amanda’s hand, or shake with Roman—offering in that quiet, unspoken way something of their own grief, and hope too. Titus stood there with his arm around Waits, watching this long procession, realizing just how many friends the Burwell family had made on this unfinished journey to Oregon. Friends these were. Friends who had stood watch, knowing nothing else to do. Friends who had offered to help dig, knowing nothing else to do. Friends who brought food and drink all through the night, not knowing what else they could do. But here they stood as the words and prayers and songs were said over this deep, deep hole dug for a tiny child … because it was what they could do.
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