Story of the Month: Walking West

“Sarah,” Alice said just before dawn, “go call Helen to breakfast.  It may be she was up late tending to Derrick and has slept in.”

Sarah skipped to the Bowens’ wagon and stopped a few feet from it.  She called Helen, but not too loudly for fear of disturbing Derrick.  When Helen didn’t answer, Sarah ventured to knock on the side board of the wagon.  Still no reply.  Thinking it would be impolite to intrude further, Sarah went to get her mother.

Alice looked cautiously into the narrow wagon.  Derrick and Helen lay unmoving side by side.  A low moan came from Helen. When Alice stepped on the foot board and leaned over the spring seat, a putrid odor of vomit and feces hung over the Bowens.  Alice held one hand over her nose and mouth to block out the foul smells.  She gently shook Helen’s arm and then Derrick’s and quickly withdrew.

Pulling Sarah with her, Alice backed away from the gruesome wagon.  Last night she hadn’t been sure.  She’d hoped it was only dysentery.  There’d been no cold sweats, no vomiting, no sore throat.  Now Derrick was dead, and Helen’s life was draining away rapidly.

“Ma, what is it?” Sarah asked fearfully.

“Cholera.”

“But Helen said it was the flux.”

“They can look alike at the start.”

“Oh, Ma, Ellen had the flux bad last night.  Flinder was bringing her in and out the tent all night.  She complained her throat hurt, too.”

“Lord help us.”  Alice felt panic alight on her like some dark, sharp-clawed bird of prey.

She had tried throughout the journey to protect her family by every means she could.  She aired their bedding, she fed them regularly and well, she rubbed them with turpentine to ward off mosquitoes.  She was, by these measures, arming against no particular ailment, but, rather, making the only concrete gestures available to her to protest the broad threats to safety and peace the dislocation of traveling had thrown up around her.  Now here was a powerful, specific enemy with which to grapple, and Alice was afraid.

The scourge of cholera had boiled through the whole country in 1849.  Four families in the Mullers’ small congregation in Indiana had lost members to the mysterious, terrifying disease.  Alice knew that although victims could linger for days, as Derrick had, the usual course was much swifter.  A strong man could be struck suddenly and be dead in a matter of a few agonizing hours.

Dread massed in the pit of Alice’s stomach and thickened her tongue.  Though her mind buzzed with disconnected thoughts, her body felt cold and heavy, as if she were made of marble.  Desperate to act, she was seized with a sense of futility.  Recovery from cholera was possible, but it was never clear which played the saving role: the pitifully small array of remedies, prayer, or pure luck.

“Ma?” Sarah’s voice quivered.  She sounded like a much younger child.

Alice looked into Sarah’s worried face.  The girl was near tears.  It came to Alice that Sarah needed her now in an almost primitive way, as a young animal needs its mother to shield it from impending harm with her own body, her own life.  Alice had never thought of the self-reliant Sarah as requiring such blunt protection; indeed, she would have expected Sarah to recognize that there could be no perfect certainty in this world, to disbelieve it even if it were offered to her.  Yet here she stood, lips trembling, entreaty in her eyes, a child after all, a child with knowledge she didn’t want.  As thwarted as Alice felt, she knew she must dredge up from out of her own fear at least some semblance of purposeful reaction to the killer in their midst.

“You tend to breakfast,”Alice directed, calming both Sarah and herself by turning to practical matters.  “Be sure Jerusha knows about Ellen.  If we doctor her soon enough, we may save her.  I must counsel with your father.”

Sarah nodded and turned to go, swiveled back to give her mother a quick, hard embrace, and then ran off.  Alice headed for the river, where Henry and Roy had gone to fetch two wheels they’d let soak overnight.  A couple of felloes on each wheel had shrunk in the hot, dry air of the plains; consequently, the iron tires were loose, and a wheel with a loose tire was useless.  Hot-riveting was the best solution, but without a smithy available, soaking the wheels to swell them would have to do.

Alice met Henry and Roy on their way back from the river.  Alice noticed sweat stains on their shirts.  The day was going to be very hot again.

“We’ve trouble,” she began.

The men stopped to listen, their faces tight and ready.

“The Bowens are down with cholera.  Derrick’s gone already, and Helen nearly so.”

“We’ve got to burn their wagon and move on at once,” Roy declared.

“Let’s set to Derrick’s grave right away,” Henry added.  “There’ll be no time to make a coffin.”

“Helen can’t travel,” Alice objected.

“Then she must be left,” Roy said angrily.  “If someone wishes, they may stay to watch her and overtake us later.”

“Royal,” Alice said gently, “I’m not certain, but it appears your Ellen may be sick with it, too.

“Ellen?” he said, as if he couldn’t recall who she was.

“Better go see to your family,” Henry told him.  “I’ll tend to the business of the Bowens.”

Deflated, Roy walked off without another word, his shoulders bowed like a man come in from a long day’s plowing.

“The child,” Alice said, watching Roy trudge away.  “It’s too cruel.”

“Can anything be done?” Henry asked Alice.  “I’ll ride out to some other trains and look for a doctor, if you think it useful.”

Alice was touched by Henry’s willingness to help, which went against his impulse to flee, but in a corner of her heart, she wanted to blame him for the cholera.  Though she had agreed to it, the decision to make this journey had been Henry’s, had been the fruit of his dreams of adventure and his aspirations to a better life for them and their children.  She shared Henry’s hopes for the new life in California, but unlike him, she had feared the rigors of getting there would take an extravagant toll.  Her concern, dismissed as overly sensitive by Henry and Roy in Indiana, now held the shape of stark reality.  She was ashamed to notice in herself a bitter satisfaction.

“We can do the same for Ellen as a doctor would,” she answered.  “It may be too late anyway.”

“Come on, then.  Let’s pack up.”

“Henry, it may be of little difference to Helen, she is so near the end, but Ellen…  I’m sure Jerusha will not want to subject her to the miseries of lying sick with cholera in a moving wagon. Would you leave your sister and her family to suffer this calamity alone?”

“Ellen will live or she won’t, Alice.  We must consider the healthy ones above the ailing.”

Alice knew he was right.  Even before he spoke, her inclination to stand by the Halls was losing the battle with her instinct to spare her own family.  She felt a sudden partnership with Henry in this horrible crisis.  Her swallowed rebukes evaporated.

Alice wrapped her arms tightly around Henry’s waist and pressed the side of her face against his chest, wanting the reassurance of his strength.  He smelled of tobacco and stale sweat and sawdust, acrid, familiar smells.

He put his hands on top of her head and dug his fingers through her hair to her scalp, which was gritty with road dust.  He massaged her head and neck and shoulders.  After a few minutes, he put his hands on her hips and separated her from him.

“There’s hard things need doing this day, girlie.  You must school in now.”

They returned to camp without further conversation and set about the usual morning tasks of packing with the solemn vigor of fugitives.

 

A herd of grazing buffalo was slowly passing the Muller camp, not even glancing aside at the small group of wagons and the people rushing to and fro.  There were thousands of the tremendous beasts.  The Bowens’ wagon was locked within the herd.  Henry, finding Helen dead after his return from the river with Alice, had had the wagon pulled about a mile away from camp, where it sat unnaturally alone, as terse a sign as a grave marker, which, in essence, it was.  Its dirty canvas top stood out whitely against the heaving brown drove.  Occasionally the wagon would be jostled into eerie vibration, as if someone inside were shaking it, trying to get out.

The herd stretched ten miles on the other side of the Bowens’ wagon.  The men paused nervously in their work from time to time to check the herd, watching for any warning sign that the mass of huge animals might be about to make a thundering run to the river.  The camp was right in their path.

Jerusha, too, sitting beside her sick daughter, glanced at the herd from time to time.  Though it was not yet midmorning, it was already hotter than it had been at noon on other days.  It seemed to Jerusha that the heat emanated from the Bowens’ wagon, as if it were the bonfire Roy had wished to make it.

Ellen lay in the shade cast by her parents’ wagon, though it was not much cooler there than in the sun, only less bright.  Jerusha had tied a slat bonnet on the girl to screen her face from the floating dust churned up by the buffaloes’ hooves.  She knew that Ellen was probably past noticing such fine points of comfort, but fine points were all Jerusha had left to offer.

An hour before, she had stopped giving Ellen laudanum and peppermint water and had told Alice not to bother making any more mustard plasters.  Ellen had begun vomiting, and Jerusha knew that that symptom meant all hope was gone.  Now she could only watch and wait and try to ease her daughter’s passing.  She held Ellen and rocked her like a baby when the stomach cramps hit her.  The girl was sleeping lightly when Roy and Flinder approached.

Roy squatted beside his ailing daughter.  She seemed to him already gone.  He could barely recollect the bony feel of her on his lap or the way her skin and hair smelled after a bath, the citrus scent of lemon, the vestiges of lavender.  He did not touch her, but only stared at her, as if expecting her at any moment to open her eyes and tell him something.  Or, better, to ask for something, something within his power to give her.  For Ellen’s plight left Roy feeling, above all else, helpless and useless, unmanned.

“Let Flinder watch a while,” Roy said at last to Jerusha.  “Come refresh yourself.”

Flinder held out a plate of beans, rice, and fried eggs.  Alice had bought eggs that morning from an enterprising woman on a passing train who had several crates of chickens tied to the sides of her wagon. 

“No.  I’ll stay,” Jerusha answered, brushing a fly off Ellen’s clammy cheek.

“Come now, I say.”  Roy pulled gently but insistently on Jerusha’s arm.

She stood up and listlessly accepted the plate of food.  Flinder took her place, cooing a greeting to her drowsing sister.  Roy walked Jersusha just outside the circle of wagons and stopped.  He watched her eat a few mouthfuls before he spoke.

“Bennett and Webster are digging graves for Derrick and Helen,” he said.

“I saw Mr. Bennett with a shovel.”  Jerusha was still eating, but with obvious disinterest.

“It’s been suggested they dig a third one, too,” he continued.  “For the saving of time.”

The fork halted halfway to Jerusha’s mouth, and all signs of weariness and sorrow fled her features.

“Who has dared utter such inhuman thoughts?  And you, you repeat them to the mother of a dying child, your child!”

Roy straightened up, as if squaring off for an arduous physical task.

“It’s my duty to tell you that, as she is my child, I have consented to the idea.”

“A father’s right.  A husband’s duty.”  Jerusha’s voice was a tight, angry whisper.  “What of a Christian’s duty to trust in the Lord?”

“Jerusha, you yourself called her a dying child.  We must move on the moment we can, to save others.” 

Jerusha looked away from her husband, fixing her gaze out over the dark, rippling sea of the buffalo herd.  Roy couldn’t see her face, which in profile was hidden by her sunbonnet.

He thought absurdly of a pet box turtle he’d had as a boy.  Despite years of being handled, it had never failed to pull into its shell whenever he put his face close to its head.  Roy had never felt its breath.

Jerusha turned, and Roy caught a flash of pink skin and brown hair as she bent her head and stared down at her plate.  He had to lean toward her to hear her.

“Can any words unbend you?” she said.

“No.”

She looked at him then, her eyes filled with reproach, and handed him back the plate of half-eaten food.

“I’m going back to Ellen now.  When next you see me away from the wagon, it will be finished.”

Roy watched her walk away.  A good farmer knew when to let his draft animals have their heads and when to rein them in, and a wise husband knew when to let his woman take the last word.  Besides, looking into Jerusha’s face just now, Roy had recalled how perfectly her pointed chin was replicated in Ellen, and the tragic fact of the child’s death suddenly visited him as a real and personal loss.

When Jerusha returned to Ellen, she saw that Flinder had taken off her sister’s bonnet, washed her face, and neatly plaited her long dark red hair into one thick braid at the side of her head.  Ellen was still, eyes closed; from time to time her breath came fast, and she rubbed her hands over her belly like a woman with birth pangs, but she had left off groaning.  Flinder, sitting on the ground beside her, was crying in long, silent gulps.

“Come now,” Jerusha said to her older daughter.  “Take yourself off somewhere and collect yourself.  Our Ellen wouldn’t want to think she was the cause of such grief.”

“Oh, Ma!”  Flinder stood up and reached for her mother.  The girl’s body felt strong and vital in the tired woman’s arms.  Jerusha didn’t want to let go, yet at the same time, Flinder’s bloom served to underscore Ellen’s infirmity, and Jerusha, at first comforted by Flinder’s embrace, next became woe-stricken by it.

“Go along now,” Jerusha said, wiping the tears off Flinder’s cheeks.

“I can stay with you.  I’ll be all right.”

“No, no.  I know misery is supposed to love company, but I think I’m better alone now.  If you want to be of use, go console your little brother.  And help with the loading.”

Flinder nodded.  “I love you,” she said to Ellen, stooping to kiss her forehead.  Then she strode off quickly, as if pursued.

Jerusha settled herself down beside Ellen to wait, and while she sat there, she thought about love.  She wondered if Ellen had gotten enough.  Love, which had eluded Jerusha in her parents’ home and in her husband’s bed, was something she had only truly begun to understand when she’d become a mother.

Jerusha’s younger brothers and sisters had been burdens to her.  Her mother had borne nine children in twelve years and had died by her own hand when the last one was three days old.  Jerusha buried the empty bottles of laudanum behind the smokehouse under the light of a full moon.  She told no one.  She held her father accountable.  A light sleeper, Jerusha had heard her mother plead with him time and again, after there were six little ones in the house, not to inflict her with any more babies.  Jerusha was unforgiving against her mother as well, for her desperate act had snared her daughter, at 11, into the very life she had found so intolerable.

Henry was the only person for whom Jerusha felt deep affection.  Her one older sibling, he required from her only the getting of his meals and the laundering and mending of his clothes, and he took on unasked much of the care of the motherless infant.  Henry was stiff with their father, a cold, self-contained man, and did not question Jerusha’s unspecified grudge against him.

Jerusha had thought at first that Royal Hall was like Henry.  Because Roy was laconic, she assumed him gentle.  Because he was physically strong and decisive, she believed he could afford to be generous.  When she learned later he was not all she had presumed, her disappointment was short-lived.  Her was after all, what she expected, in general, a man to be, and marriage was the arrangement she had always thought it to be.  It was better, she told herself, to bend the neck than bruise the forehead.

The children had helped her in her effort to make a long harvest of a little corn.  In a very real sense, Roy had been the father of Jerusha’s love, and however much else she counted against him, she was always beholden to him for that.

How she had doted on Flinder as a baby!  She was drunk with love for her.  That the pleasure was so unexpected added to its richness.  Each new child had been a new intoxication, though none as consuming as the first.

Roy hadn’t been much comfort when the second baby died that one hard winter.  Maybe he would have felt more if it had been a son.  And now Ellen, dreamy-eyed Ellen, almost out of childhood but destined to be stayed there forever.  The two favorites left, Flinder hers and Gideon Roy’s.  Hard as it was, she was secretly glad that Roy was acting  to spare them.  Roy was always a man to take charge.  She was glad she didn’t need to.  He had released her to spend all her care this morning on Ellen.

“Ma,” Ellen said hoarsely.

“Yes, Ellie, I’m right here.”

“Am I going to die, Ma?  Am I?”

“Do you feel it, child?”

“I do, Ma.  It hurts so, and yet I don’t care.  I’m awful weary.”

“You’ll be going to a better place than this world, my dear.”  Jerusha truly believed this, but she found it was no solace.  If she could have arm-wrestled God for the prize of keeping her daughter alive, she would have rushed to the contest without hesitation.

“I’m afraid.  Hold my hand, I’m afraid.”

Jerusha took Ellen’s slender hand in her own calloused one. 

“Close your eyes, child.”

“No, no.  I don’t want to be alone in the dark.”

“Well, then, let’s look at the clouds and you can let your eyes drop shut just when you feel like.  Remember how you and Flinder used to read the clouds on summer days at home?”

Ellen nodded weakly.

“There, see that big one to the left?  It looks to me like a spinning top.”

“Or a dromedary.  And a prince upon its back,” Ellen whispered.

“Flinder always said you were best at this game.  What about that one there?”  Jerusha pointed to a large, barmy formation directly above them.

“A grand lady in a ball gown.”

While Jerusha was studying the cloud to pick out Ellen’s lady in it, she felt the girl’s fingers go slack in her hand.  She looked down to find Ellen’s eyes still open, but glazed and empty.  Overhead, the clouds pulled apart and reformed into new shapes, unnamed and undreamt on.

Alice’s Journal

June 28, 1852

Our niece Ellen died soon enough this morning that we were able to all pull out together.  It would have torn my heart to leave the Halls behind, even though they themselves saw the need of it. We countenanced a small delay when Jerusha, beside herself with terror that Ellen’s grave was not deep enough to keep it from being violated by wild animals, threw herself into the hole and began digging it out with her bare hands.  Roy quickly removed her, and Mr. Webster set to with a spade and dug until she was satisfied.

It is a sore trial to see young people meet death.  Such early ends hold no sense.  We are cheated not only of who they were to us, but also of who they might have yet been.  I wonder how many children Helen and Derrick might have had and what kind of home they would have built together.  I wonder what sort of woman Ellen would have matured into; she was such a shy, fanciful child.  Can the Eden of California ever be reckoned as worth costs like these? 

We are all watchful of one another, trying to detect the first signs of physical weakness.  I search my body carefully with my mind, not wishing the twinges of pregnancy to hide the beginnings of something more worrisome.

We did not burn the Bowens’ wagon on account of the buffalo surrounding it, but we wrote a note on a rag and posted it on a stick to warn away passersby.  How soon shall that rag be tattered by rain or blanched by sun?  I cannot help but consider our frail selves as little better defended than that forlorn bit of cloth against the forces of nature and disease set here around us.

 

The novel, Walking West, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1995.  

Walking West is available as an e-book, in all e-reader formats, at Macmillan Publishers and as a hardcover book on Amazon.