by Merry Farmer
“Do you want more of this cornbread before I pack the rest away?” Estelle asked him as she busied herself around the crew camp, cleaning up supper.
“No, I’m full,” Graham answered with a smile. He’d been reluctant to let her cook all his meals at first, certain cooking was something he could manage on his own, but she’d been so ready to lump him in with Pete’s crew when it came to preparing meals, and her cooking skills were so superb, that in the end he had let go of that one slip of independence. His stomach had thanked him for it every day, three times a day.
Estelle returned his smile and added a nod, then moved on to a trio of Pete’s assistants—Bob, Hank, and Lyle—lined up with their backs against a wagon wheel, finishing their lunches.
“Gentlemen?” she offered the cornbread.
“Thanks, Miss Ripley,” Bob took a piece with a wide grin.
Graham watched them, on the alert for any sign of disrespect. A big part of him was glad that Isaiah was off helping Pete repair a family’s wagon. If it came to it, his one of his crutches could easily double as a club if he needed to defend Estelle’s honor in any way. Lucky for him, everyone treated her with utmost respect. Even Isaiah, though there was something odd in the kind of respect he showed her.
A high-pitched shriek a few wagons down the line bumped Graham out of his thoughts. A pair of orphan girls ran, screaming and flailing, as one of the boys chased after them with a toad in his outstretched arms.
“Warts,” he shouted. “Froggie’s gonna give you warts.”
“Warts! Warts,” the girls screamed. They dodged between wagons, not caring who they smashed into or what boxes and barrels they upset.
“Children,” Mrs. Gravesend hollered at the top of her lungs as she tried to chase after them, then abruptly switched directions to where one of the older boys had just scooted his way out of someone’s wagon with a bottle of whiskey. “Stop it this instant. Stop it.”
She managed to snatch the liquor from the boy—her face red and splotchy, and her chest heaving—then had to march off in the other direction to grab hold of another boy who was tying one of the farmers’ daughter’s long braids to a wagon wheel while declaring, “I’m an Injun, and I gotcha.”
“Why doesn’t she just smack him and walk away?” Lyle asked, scratching his head at the sight.
“They’re playing, I guess,” Hank answered.
A small, towhead boy—the one who had slammed into Estelle in Independence—came darting into their camp, eyes wide. He zipped around Graham’s back and ducked just as two bigger boys came shooting right through where Estelle was working.
“Hey, little Tim. Time for a haircut,” one of them bellowed, holding up a pair of scissors.
Graham shifted so that the two wouldn’t see the boy behind him, presumably Tim. He had a hard time not laughing in spite of how horrible the prank would be if it succeeded. The bigger boys ran on.
Estelle caught Graham’s eye as they passed. She smiled in approval and attempted to go on with her work.
“Quiet,” Mrs. Gravesend shouted, spinning this way and that. She had a hand clutched to her chest and was puffing like she was the one running around. “Wretched beasts. Why I ever agreed to this….”
“I’ll get the one with the scissors,” Estelle’s quiet friend, Olivia, reassured the woman, then hurried off, through Graham’s camp, in pursuit of the boys. She noticed Tim, still in hiding, as she passed, but let him be.
Pete came striding into the camp a moment later.
“I’m beginning to seriously regret my decision to let them come along,” he said, shaking his head.
“The children are just restless,” Estelle tried to soothe him. “They’re bored.”
“They’re little menaces is what they are,” Pete contradicted her. “‘Just a few unfortunate waifs’, she said. ‘They won’t cause a lick of trouble.’”
“Oh,” Mrs. Gravesend yelled, swaying on her spot. She was beyond words now, evidently. Her wagon was the center of the chaos. The orphans who weren’t running around chasing each other with frogs or scissors, were painting with mud on the canvas of the wagon, feeding something to the oxen, or, in the case of one boy, cutting holes in something that looked like one of Mrs. Gravesend’s dresses. Three or four of the smaller ones were naked as the day they were born.
“We really ought to see if there’s something we can do,” Graham said. He twisted to peek over his shoulder at Tim. The boy was terrified, but when Graham smiled at him, he ventured a cautious smile in return.
“Ohhhh!”
This time, Mrs. Gravesend’s shout made the hair on the back of Graham’s neck stand up. He whipped around in time to see the poor old woman grab a fistful of her blouse over her heart. Her face was more than just red, it was livid. All at once, her eyes rolled back up into her head until there was nothing but white, and then she collapsed.
Pete and his three assistants shouted oaths and jumped to their feet, rushing to help her. Graham was halfway off his barrel before nearly pitching himself headlong to the ground. An anxious, restless wave of panic smacked him as he muscled himself to stand and shove his crutch under his sore arm. Estelle waited for him, then the two of them rushed along with a growing crowd of others to see what had happened.
“What’s wrong with her?” one of the orphan girls asked, voice cracking with fear.
“Stand back, kids,” Pete ordered them. “Somebody get the kids out of here.”
From all sides, women who had been watching the chaos, Estelle included, stepped forward to grab small hands and pick up the littler ones. A couple of the men filled the spaces the kids had been pulled away from, dropping to their knees or crouching.
“Mrs. Gravesend, Mrs. Gravesend,” Pete barked at the prone woman. He glanced up. “We got a doctor in the train?”
“Yes, me,” one of the men who had already knelt said.
Pete leaned back. The rest of the men and women crowding around gave the doctor some space. As they moved, Graham was able to get a better view of Mrs. Gravesend. One look at her face was all it took. He’d spent too many years in battle, too many weeks in army hospitals, to not know death when he saw it. The dead had a look about them, like the body they’d left behind was of no more use, and whatever they had been had moved on.
“She’s dead,” the doctor announced. A round of shocked murmurs followed. “Probably her heart. Or else an aneurism.”
For once, the children were silent. The whole camp was silent.
“What’s an aneurism?” one of the younger girls asked.
“It means her head exploded on the inside,” the teenage boy who had tried to steal the whiskey told her.
“That’s enough from you, Luke,” Pete scolded him. He stood and grabbed Luke by the arm. “Come on.”
The two of them walked off, and by the look in Pete’s eyes, Luke was about to have either a stern lecture or a sore backside. The women who had taken the younger children from the center of the fuss moved them even farther away. The doctor sighed and rocked back on his heels.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “She’s already gone.”
Pete’s assistants straightened and traded looks, scratching their heads and rubbing their chins.
“I’ll get the shovels,” Lyle said.
“Shovels?” Estelle stood straighter. “What do you mean?”
Hank turned to her, face full of apology. “On the trail, you gotta bury any bodies right away, Miss Ripley.”
“So the wild animals don’t get ’em,” Bob seconded.
“Wild animals?” the same girl who had asked what an aneurism was glanced up at him with big, round eyes.
“It’s just a precaution, little miss,” Bob said, laying a hand on her head.
The girl proceeded to throw her arms around Bob’s waist, slamming her face into his side and wailing. Bob’s eyes popped wide and he flailed, no idea what to do.
In short order, the rest of the younger children were crying and wai
ling too. Graham had to admit that part of him shared their shock and grief.
“We should have done something sooner,” he murmured to Estelle, who clutched a small boy to her chest as he wept. “We knew she needed help, and we did nothing.”
Estelle shared his guilt, he could tell by the look on her face, but she also wore a pragmatic frown. “The best we can do now is care for the children.”
It was the only thing they could do, the only thing Graham could do. When Lyle returned with the shovels, Graham’s hands itched to take one and help dig the grave. He felt compelled to carry Mrs. Gravesend away from the center of the camp and up the trail to where she would be laid to rest ahead of all the wagons, so they could drive over the grave and pack the earth down. He could do none of that in his condition.
With a frustrated sigh, he turned to hobble back to his barrel by the campfire. He stopped short at the sight of a towhead and wide, blue eyes. Tim was still tucked behind his barrel, trembling hands gripping the top edge as he stared at the spot where Mrs. Gravesend had fallen.
“It’s all right, son,” Graham told him. He crossed the rest of the space and plopped onto the barrel, wearier than he’d been before. “We’ll get through this.”
He offered an arm in case Tim needed a hug or wanted to sit on his lap. Not that Graham would have known what to do in that case. Tim stayed where he was, sinking to sit on the ground behind the barrel, silent. Graham had a feeling that was the best he was going to get. He didn’t blame the boy. At that moment, all he wanted to do was sit and shake his head too.
It didn’t seem right. Moving on so quickly after Mrs. Gravesend’s death just didn’t seem right to Estelle, in spite of the logic of the situation. She understood the reasons, but her heart ached for the children. In a flash, they’d gone from having direction, if not stability, to being lost without guidance. Josephine was seeing to their immediate needs, but that wasn’t a long-term solution. They were already orphans, and now another person had left them.
“It breaks my heart,” Estelle voiced her feelings at the first official meeting of Mr. Nelson’s trail council. “So much loss in lives that are so new.”
Estelle was as surprised as anyone that the council was actually needed, and so soon. Mrs. Gravesend hadn’t been dead for more than twenty-four hours when the handful of men and women selected by Clarence Nelson and Pete to organize the business of the wagon train had been called to meet over lunch during their midday stop.
“Better they learn now and develop the skills to cope with hardship than grow up not knowing how to take care of themselves,” Nelson said. His wife, Ruth, sitting next to him, nodded in agreement.
“They’re orphans,” Josephine Lewis spoke up. Pete had asked her to join the council as well. She sat between Estelle and Pete with a frown. “I’d say they’ve already had to cope with hardships. Plenty of them, like Libby Chance, are already taking care of themselves, and the younger ones to boot.”
“I still say that people like that should be more concerned with knowing how to fit into their place in the world than relying on the better sort, like us, to do everything for them,” Ruth Nelson said.
“Better sort?” Josephine balked.
“Well, yes,” Ruth replied, as if it was obvious.
“What gives you the right—”
“We’re here to talk about the children,” Pete reminded everyone, placing a hand on Josephine’s arm before she could fly off.
Estelle shared a wary look with Graham. If she was lucky, Graham shared Josephine’s ire at Ruth’s suggestion that some people were better than others. If she wasn’t lucky, whatever the quiver in her gut when she and Graham shared a smile was would be crushed before it had a chance to grow.
And as wrong as she knew it was, to Estelle, that felt like a tragedy.
“Pete is right,” Nelson went on. “We need to think about those displaced children. Lt. Tremaine, what do you think?”
Graham blinked and sat straighter. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I have no experience with children. I do think someone needs to care for them, though.”
“Olivia and I have been keeping them in hand as much as possible, but there’s only so much two spinsters can do with fourteen children,” Josephine said. “And they’re all upset about Mrs. Gravesend, even though the older ones aren’t admitting it.”
“We could all take turns supervising them,” Hugh Warfel, one of the more prosperous farmers in the wagon train suggested.
“Not me,” Ruth murmured.
“Estelle, what do you think?” Graham asked. Something in his eyes told Estelle he had complete confidence in her ability to come up with an answer.
Just knowing that sent the ideas flowing.
“It might be easier to divide the children between willing families,” she said. “It would distribute responsibility among a larger group of people. Maybe some of those families would even see fit to adopt the child in their care.”
Hums and murmurs of agreement made their way around the circle of the council.
“What a fine suggestion,” Nelson said with a smile for Estelle. “Lt. Tremaine, you have spot-on judgment in your taste in friends.”
Estelle blushed under the compliment. It sat uneasily on her shoulders, though, almost as if she’d lied to all of the people who looked at her with approval.
“Estelle’s intelligence and kindness speak for themselves,” Graham said.
Her blush deepened and her heart flipped. It was exactly the sort of reaction she couldn’t afford. Not at all.
“Right then,” Pete said. “We’ll divide the kids up between whoever will take them.”
“And we should stop for at least one day in order to do that,” Josephine added.
“Now hold on.” Pete held up a hand. “We can’t go stopping and starting every other day on the trail like that. It may not seem like it now, but we have to cover a certain amount of land every day if we’re to make it through the mountains before the weather gets bad.”
“I know that.” Josephine plunked her fists on her hips as she sat. To Estelle’s eyes, it seemed like she was enjoying the confrontation. “But these are children. They’ve just lost their chaperone. I think we can give them one day to settle down.”
“Snow, Josephine. Snow up to your backside. That’s what’s waiting for us in the mountains,” Pete said.
Estelle had a hard time keeping a straight face all of a sudden.
“Perhaps we could get a late start tomorrow morning, handle the details then,” she said.
“I’ll support that,” Ruth said. She smiled at Estelle as if the two of them had made the decision already.
Pete sighed. “All right. We’ll take care of it tomorrow morning, and we’ll head out after lunch instead of at first light.”
The issue was settled, and the council meeting concluded. Within an hour, the wagon train had formed up again and moved on. Estelle was left with the feeling that she’d done something right, something good. But the other side of that feeling—the worry that letting herself be a part of something as important as a council would cause trouble if the other council members knew the truth—left her feeling disconcerted.
Those uneasy feelings stayed with her after they stopped that night. She finished serving supper to Pete’s crew, then spooned out a bowl of stew for Graham and one for herself, hoping she’d find her appetite through her worry. She carried both bowls and a few pieces of bread to where Graham was seated, ignoring the way Isaiah watched them.
“I hope the plan for the children works out,” she confided in Graham, handing him his supper, then sitting on a crate beside him to eat her own.
Graham bit into his bread with a grateful sigh. After he had chewed and swallowed, he said, “It should. Pete’s right about not stopping, though. We have to make good time or we could be stuck later.”
A smile broke out on Estelle’s face. “This from the man who thinks he’s a fool for making the journey.”
Graham m
et her comment with a guilty laugh. They continued to eat without conversation. They didn’t need conversation. The two of them could sit and contemplate the train and their situation in silence, and Estelle still felt as though they were communing. She shouldn’t, but it was so nice to have a friend again that she couldn’t help herself.
After supper, Graham stood and moved back toward the oxen, still yoked to the front of his wagon. Balancing on one crutch, he worked to remove the yoke so that the team could be taken closer to water and more grass.
“I can help with that,” Estelle said, leaving the small pile of dirty dishes for the moment.
“I can do it,” Graham said, proving his words by freeing the first ox.
“It’s a two-person job to begin with,” she half scolded him, a knowing smile on her lips.
Their eyes met, and Graham broke down in a sheepish laugh. “All right,” he said. “You can help.”
She shook her head at him, a warmth spreading from her smile, through her chest, and down to her fingers and toes. She walked around to the far side, opposite from where Graham worked to loosen the second yoke. As she reached to help him with the latches, their hands touched.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Their eyes met. Estelle drew in a breath. Once again, she was struck by how blue Graham’s eyes were, and how fraught with pain. He didn’t force a smile or soften his expression for politeness’s sake. Instead, he slid his fingers along hers, threading their hands together.
Estelle’s heart pounded as though he’d caressed her in intimate places. A sweet ache formed at the core of her being. She wanted this man—this man she could never have. She wanted to hold him and be held by him, telling him everything would be all right and hearing the same from him. She wanted to be the respected woman that the others on the trail council thought she was, and to have the freedom to love who she wanted as a result of that. It was easy to want something, but reality was a different story.
