Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  Back in those days when they were young and strong, bold … and … and didn’t know any better. In a time before they began to realize they had brought about their own undoing …

  While for him the adventure still began anew with every sunrise, with these movers one day just seemed to bleed into the next. Good people as they were, Amanda’s family among them, their kind seemed driven to be somewhere else rather than enjoying the journey of getting there. Sweat and suffering, fatigue and frustration—pushing on through the constant wind and the ever-present sun until it was night, then they closed their eyes for a short while before the sun was up again for another day while the train rolled a little farther, one more day with all the joy drained out of it but for the fact that they congratulated themselves that their train was one day closer to the Willamette.

  He breathed deep, smelling the sharp, tangy fragrance of the sage crushed beneath the wheels. Whining hubs that, if a man didn’t force his mind onto something else, was all he heard—their groaning against the axles. A constant squeak of wagon boxes shifting with the terrain, the rattle of everything strapped, roped, or hung from the sidewalls—this incessant symphony that carried these movers in a quest to find their dreams. So steadfast and single-minded were these emigrants that he knew they would make it to Oregon country. He had nary a doubt. If they had made it to the Southern Pass, Bridger’s post, to the Bear and Soda Springs, and now to Fort Hall … they were no longer innocents, and toughened by adversity and loss—these sodbusters would indeed reach the Willamette.

  They were of a kind, these farmers, settlers, family folk who brought their schools, churches, and a quiet tidiness to a new place. While not wild or smart, they bored on through life with dogged determination to do, to accomplish, to see things set right in their own image, town by town. Just as it had been for his grandpap, and his pap after him. Titus was so young when he fled those shackles others were about to rivet around his ankles and wrists, too young to realize that even though it would never be a life for him, it could be a life of honor and decency for the many. Older now, many more choices had he made and regrets piled up. Yet Scratch had spent enough time with these emigrants that he had come to understand something of them and why they were going, even if that going wasn’t for him. The land out there in Oregon must surely be big enough for all their dreams, even if it wasn’t big enough for his.

  Only this country had ever been big enough to capture and contain his dreams. Only … this.

  “Ti-tuzz!”

  He heard Waits yell his name before he saw her appear at the rear pucker hole, reining her horse close to the rear of the wagon. She sat swaying in that woman’s snare saddle, its high pommel and cantle both decorated with brass tacks and colorful quillwork and long, jiggling fringe.

  Pushing himself up on an elbow, he asked, “What do you see?”

  “White man’s post!”

  “Hallee?”

  “Sweete go on,” she said in his American tongue, still grinning as she made a gesture. “Ride to post first.”

  Shifting himself some off the healing buttock, he inquired, “How far now?”

  Waits gazed up at the sun, then concentrated on the distance where they were headed, and finally back to look at him. “Not long, Ti-tuzz. Much light left after we make camp.”

  He wanted to see for himself as they crossed the broad, barren ridge and rumbled ever onward. Dragging his weight up by his arms, gripping those crates and boxes roped against both inside walls of the wagon’s box, Bass rolled over with that good leg braced beneath him and found that it did not hurt all that much to put a little weight on the injured hip. Slowly, keeping himself braced with his arms, he inched his way forward to reach the front opening, hoisted himself up on the back of the bench behind the farmer, and peered out. These ox teams did not require the heavy lines and harness of a six-horse hitch. Instead, most of the emigrants did not have to ride at the front of the wagon, but chose to walk alongside their teams, nudging them with a judicious use of a whip or stick to make a change in direction.

  “That’s Hallee, Roman,” he announced as those in the lead began to shout and cheer, laugh and whistle, rejoicing at their arrival.

  Burwell turned with surprise at the trapper’s sudden appearance, then smiled. “You’re moving around a little more today, I see.”

  “Nothin’ much keeps me tied down for long—”

  “Is that my father you’re talking to?” Amanda asked as her face came into view on the other side of the plodding team.

  Titus asked her, “You know what that is off yonder?”

  “Fort Hall?”

  “Can’t be nothin’ else.”

  “Oh, Roman!” she gushed. “If only we’d …”

  Bass watched her face gray with regret; then Amanda dragged a finger under one eye and appeared to give herself a new shot of resolve.

  “Happy as I am to reach this place,” she explained, looking up at him as the wagon jostled him from side to side, “it’s a bittersweet arrival.”

  “Lucas made it here with you an’ Roman,” Titus reminded. “His spirit goin’ all the way to Oregon with you.”

  “But you aren’t,” she complained as some of the rejoicing from other wagons around them died away. “Did you think any more about our offer, Pa?”

  “Ever’ damned bump along the way,” he admitted.

  Her face registered excitement. “That means you’ve decided to go on with us?”

  “No,” he said, watching the glee drain from her sunburned face beneath that bonnet. “Ever’ mile we come closer to Fort Hall, I thought on reasons why I couldn’t go with you two.”

  “Waits? And your children?” she prodded.

  “Them, yeah. ’Specially them,” he confessed.

  She pushed a sprig of her oak-colored hair back under the ribbon of her poke bonnet and gazed up at him from beneath the bill that framed her face. “They’d have a fine place to grow up and live in Oregon, Pa. Safe, once we get to the Willamette.”

  “Safe.” He repeated that dream word with a sigh, watching the figures appear at the top of the tall earthen walls of the fort there beneath the fluttering red banner, one small blue Union Jack tucked up in the corner above the three large letters: N B C. “I can’t hardly recollect anymore how it was to live safe, Amanda—I been in this life o’ mine for so long.”

  She asked, “You wouldn’t come for your children?”

  Then Roman added, “That’s the reason we come to a new land.”

  “Much as you make it sound sweet to a man’s ears,” he replied, seeing the first wagon teams starting to curve gracefully away from the walls at Shad’s direction, the big man standing in the stirrups and waving them toward a far pasture, “it’s for my family that I can’t go where the rest of you are headed.”

  “But mostly for you,” Amanda said with resignation.

  “Mostly for me,” he confessed. “Maybeso, you are comin’ to unnerstand your pa.”

  Three stone chimneys were visible over the twenty-foot-high walls, only one of them smoking at this time of day. A large square blockhouse stood at one corner, a smaller one at the opposite corner, both covered by shake roofs drawn up in a peak. Like the adobe stockade constructed by the Bent brothers on the Arkansas, the tops of these walls were rounded in places, crudely scalloped by wind and rain eroding the mud surface clearly in need of repair. Four low doorways penetrated the one wall he inspected as they inched past, causing little stir among the post’s occupants.

  “John Bull,” Titus said.

  “You know someone here?” Roman asked.

  “No. John Bull’s what we call … what we did call the Englishers, the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

  Burwell wagged his head as he stared at the mud wall. “Gets my goat to find the English squatting down right here between the United States and Oregon.”

  “I knowed a good Englishman or two,” Titus explained as they turned past another wall, where stood the main gate, a double just w
ide enough to permit entry to a wagon. “As for me, the rest of ’em you could throw into the sea an’ never let ’em set foot this side of Red River of the North!”

  “Does my heart good to hear you speak no ill of America, Titus,” Roman said, goading the off-hand ox with his long stick.

  “Speak ill of America?” he echoed, brow knitting.

  “Wasn’t sure, all this time, where you stood on making Oregon our territory,” Burwell explained. “From what I heard you say to Amanda, sounded to me you were over and done with the country where you were born and raised.”

  “I am,” he admitted. “But just because I turned my back on America don’t mean I want John Bull in here!”

  “Rally up for Oregon!” Roman cheered as they reached a campground with some untrammeled grass over on the east bank of a river that fed the Snake from the south. “Build it strong for America and toss the British out!”

  “Ho, for Oregon!” another emigrant shouted as the wagons peeled off in two directions to pick their camps.

  Came a new voice, “Oregon for Americans!”

  “Throw the English out on their ass!” a man shouted lustily, their voices echoing from the timber.

  Here they would lay over, rest the teams, trade for what they might need in a final push down the Snake to the Columbia before reaching the Willamette. Come so far, they now found themselves no more than eight hundred miles from their promised land. And it was here that Roman Burwell surprised the old trapper when he dragged the oxen to a halt and turned around to lay his arms across the back of the crude plank seat, gazing in at his father-in-law.

  “I been wanting to tell you something for the last few days, back as far as the time we took our train away from Hargrove,” he explained. “Wanted to somehow get across that I started out for Oregon with a reason firm in my mind. Was a time I figured I was going simply because it was best for Oregon to belong to America. Later on I thought I was going for the land—land they told us was so rich a man hardly needed to work it.”

  “Good land for a farmer, that,” Titus said as Amanda and Lemuel came up to the front wheel.

  Burwell’s face went grave with the creases of a simple man not easily given to introspection. “But a strange thing come over me—not sudden, but slow, Titus. Slow, with every mile we come outta Missouri, making our way along the Platte. Farther we went, the more I wanted to see. Not just to get to Oregon—but to really see what new country each new day showed us.”

  Slipping her arm through her son’s, Amanda said, “This is country that draws a body on and on and on, making you hungry to see what’s coming next down the river, around the hill, over the ridge.”

  Roman dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Used to be, I had me a good reason to take my family to Oregon. Thought of putting every mistake and misstep behind us, thinking of the fresh start we’d make out there. But the farther we got into this land, the more I lost hold on the words I can use to tell you why I brung Amanda and the four of … these three children on this long road. This far from our old home, and this close to our new land—I don’t have words no more I can use to make anyone understand. …”

  As the farmer’s words dropped off and he seemed at a loss, Titus said, “Maybeso you might just be doin’ the right thing, for the right reason after all, son.”

  Sweete came loping up on his horse. “The women got a good spot picked out down by the bank. Cool and shady. Feel up to getting down on your legs an’ walking over there with me?”

  “If I never see the inside of one of these God-infernal wagon bellies again,” he grumped as he hobbled around and started toward the back pucker hole at the rear gate, “it’ll be too damn soon!”

  “Thought you was comfortable, Pa,” Amanda sent her voice in after him.

  He stopped, looked back over his shoulder at her, saying, “You made me a plenty good bed, daughter. Soft as I ever laid myself on. Only trouble is—your pa’s a man rather be sittin’ on a horse when he goes through new country.”

  “Good,” she sighed with relief. “Here I was thinking you weren’t comfortable … when it was only a matter of you being grumpy!”

  “Wouldn’t want you to think anything else of me, Amanda dear.”

  Her face suddenly appeared at the rear gate. “I love you anyway, grumpy.”

  He stopped short in surprise, looking down at her dusty face and shiny eyes filled with the mist of sentiment. Bass felt his pooling too as she and Roman pulled the iron bolts from their hasps and lowered the gate for him.

  “Amanda,” he said softly. “N-no matter where your grumpy ol’ pa goes here on out, or what he does with hisself … I’ll always love you.”

  That evening Scratch asked his wife to accompany him on a walk to the fort walls and see who was about.

  “Someone who remembers your friend, the man who is no longer here?” she asked in Crow, using that term of highest respect for the departed by not speaking their name.

  “Yes, maybe someone here knew him, worked with the man back in better days.”

  They had reached the point where he would turn back with his family once the Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company started across the Snake River. Maybe Phineas Hargrove would arrive with his California bunch by then, and the two of them would have it out here in the shadow of this fort. Come what may in the next few days, Scratch felt at peace about Roman Burwell and where the farmer was taking his family. He was proud of the man Amanda had chosen to cling to. No matter that Roman could not dredge up the words to explain his feelings about why he was transplanting his family into that yonder territory. The look in his eyes was good enough for Titus Bass.

  If Roman moved on to Oregon, if he never did return to these mountains with Amanda and their children, then the man had for a heartbeat in time been unable to put words to something that really had no words to describe it. After all, how could any man wrap his mind, his thoughts, his plain and simple vocabulary around this great and terrible wilderness Titus Bass himself had come to love so deeply? He had decided long ago that some things were indeed best left unexplained. Best not to attempt to put the artificial boundaries of gussied-up words around the now, around the being here. Once a man tried to express that sort of thing, why—a little of the utter freedom of this land couldn’t help but leak out. So let the promoters, land speculators, and shysters put their snake-oil words on that yonder country, fancy words to sell the territory to the dreamers who had been waiting to find a dream. As sure as sun, attaching those foofaraw words to Oregon put a claim on the land, and somehow made it already tame.

  But that frightened him to the quick. How long could he keep this used-to-be country wild before someone much smarter than he found the words to tame it? Titus Bass knew he wanted his bones to be bleaching in the wind and the sun long before any folk ever came north to lay claim to what he alone had known.

  Even though he supported himself with a stout limb, the two of them moved slow, deliberate, as he put weight on injured muscle, stretching the leg for the first time in four days. Both of the dogs quickly grew tired of the snail’s pace and darted off for the riverbank to investigate something far more interesting. Although she was curious about the fort, Waits was in no hurry to be anywhere, content to walk beneath his arm, one step at a time, as they ambled toward the fort walls while the sun bled from sight.

  “Your traders still around?” he asked of a dark-skinned half-breed who was pushing a cart of firewood toward the main gate.

  “Traders, oui,” the worker replied with a thick voyageur’s pull on the language. “Ovair there.”

  As they stepped inside the trade room, a man behind the long counter had his back to them, his fingers pulling through a bolt of cloth, measuring out one arm length at a time. “Be with you shortly. Make yourself comfortable and look about for what you might need.”

  “Would like to see some pretties for my woman and my daughter too,” he explained to the man’s back. “’Sides a few earbobs and shinies, I was wonderin’
if this here still a Hudson’s Bay post.”

  “It is for certain, sir.”

  “How long you been workin’ for ’em?”

  The man turned and studied Titus a moment before he answered, “It will be twelve years come December.”

  Before he spoke again Scratch let the man pull out a large wooden tray divided off with various ornaments and jewelry in each small section. As his wife went to touching and studying every new eye-catcher, Titus asked, “Ever you know a man named Jarrell Thornbrugh?”

  That caused the trader’s hands to halt his work at a new bolt of cloth. “You are American?”

  “Time was, yes.”

  “I knew Jarrell, well enough that I called him my friend. How is it you would know of him?”

  “Met him on the Columbia of a time long ago,” Bass declared wistfully. “We rode down that river to Fort Vancouver where I come to meet the doctor.”

  “McLoughlin?”

  “That’s the one. Tall man—wild white hair like a bald-headed eagle. Eyes like a pair of white stones too.”

  “You said you’re American?”

  “Was,” Titus admitted. “Ain’t no more.”

  It was clear the trader didn’t understand. “I … don’t see—”

  “Me and mine, we live in the Rocky Mountains. They ain’t American. Don’t belong to your English either.”

  “When was the last time you saw Jarrell?”

  Scratch dug at his chin whiskers, sorting through the rendezvous. “Don’t rightly remember the year. Only was told the next summer he’d got took by the ague. Fell sick and died quick.”

  “It’s been long enough now I haven’t heard his name for many a year. Not till you walked in here and spoke it out loud.” The trader held out his hand. “I’m Hanratty. Pleased to make your acquaintance … Mister … ?”