Wind Walker

SEVENTEEN

“Is there anything we can do for the boy?” Titus whispered to his wife as he crouched at the fire beside her, their faces almost touching as they rummaged through Waits-by-the-Water’s rawhide pouch filled with small skin sacks of leaves and roots, powders and mosses, bark and crushed insects too. All of it they spread out on a piece of old blanket between them, then waited for the water to come to a boil.

She looked into his eyes, and he already knew.

“There is nothing I know of that has enough power to kill the snake’s spirit,” she confessed in a barely audible whisper, even though she spoke in Crow.

“Except the First Maker,” he whimpered as Shad came up to kneel beside him.

Sweete glanced at his wife and said, “Toote seen a lot of rattler bites.”

“And?”

Shad’s face was long and drawn as he answered, “But none of ’em ever made it, Scratch.” Then Sweete laid his trunk of an arm across the thin man’s shoulders. “You done all you could. You sucked him, you burned them bites too. There ain’t nothing but the leaves and roots and a medicine man’s prayin’ left to do now.”

How he wanted to let go so his own shoulders could quake with frustration, with utter fear, even some building anger too. But instead he turned and peered into the face of his old friend. “Ask Shell Woman to bring over anything she’s got what’ll help us make the boy feel a li’l easier. I knowed her medeecin saved your arm, likely it saved your life. I can only pray Shell Woman’s power gonna save that li’l boy’s life too.”

Without a word, Shadrach stood and shuffled off. Behind him Titus could hear Amanda sobbing again as her feet dragged across the sandy soil. Other folks were murmuring around them too, everyone staying back aways, keeping a respectful distance from the wagon and the wide awning Roman had just finished stringing up between the top of the wagon bed and a pair of poles when Magpie came running with her terrible news.

Titus had Magpie and Leah pull out the canvas bedsacks and comforters from the back of the wagon as they approached, instructing the girls to make Lucas as soft a pallet as they could in the shade beneath that awning on the lee side of the wagon near the fire. It was where the children and the two dogs always chose to sleep each night on the trail. This is where Digger and Ghost now dropped to their bellies and scooted across the sandy ground to keep a watch on the humans. And here too Scratch slowly settled with the tiny body in his arms, Jackrabbit still clutching that tourniquet stick with both his tiny brown hands.

“Amanda,” he had called to her in a quiet voice as Roman brought her up to the awning, the crowd stopping several yards behind mother and father. “You need to be strong, woman. This boy needs a-strong mother right now.”

She had nodded.

“Can you be strong for my Lucas boy?”

Her chin quivered so as she had nodded again, then slowly peeled herself away from Roman.

“C’mere an’ sit beside me, daughter,” he asked.

Once she had settled right beside her father, Amanda took a long, deep breath, then leaned over and wrapped her arms around Lucas, slowly taking him from Bass’s embrace. Into Jackrabbit’s ear he had whispered, “Your hands tired?”

The boy shook his head, and kept holding that stick with white-knuckled intensity, his big black eyes pooling, tears muddying his cheeks.

“Amanda,” Titus, said softly as he shifted onto his knees over her and Lucas, reaching back for his skinning knife, “I’m gonna have to cut ’im a li’l—”

“Cut him?”

“On them bites.”

For a few long moments she had stared at those two punctures high on the side of Lucas’s right calf. “Will it hurt him?”

He shook his head. “Don’t think he’s gonna feel nothin’ much from here on out now.”

After she had nodded reluctantly, he clutched the sharp blade down near the point and started work on those two swollen black holes, saying, “I gotta suck out what I can.”

Gently, carefully, slowly he had sliced down with the tip of the blade through each of the holes, making the incisions long enough below each hole to account for the downward curve of the rattler’s fangs as they struck the innocent boy at play. The skin bled freely, instantly, the flesh so taut, swollen, and already hot to the touch.

Lucas groaned.

“Stop, Pa!”

Softly Bass said to her, “I ain’t hurtin’ him. It’s the p’isen, Amanda. That’s what pains him so.”

Gently he squeezed the two wounds between a thumb and finger, swiped off the blood with the side of his hand, then bent over the leg there below the narrow leather whang he had fashioned into a tourniquet. Continuing the pressure on the wounds with his thumb and finger, Titus formed a seal with his lips and sucked. When he sensed the salty taste on his tongue, the warmth against his lips, Scratch pulled back, turned his head, and spat onto the ground. Again and again he bent, sucked, and spat. Until he figured that he had done all the good he could.

“You get it all, Pa?” she asked as he leaned back after that last time and dragged the sleeve of his shirt across his mouth.

“Dunno.”

Roman knelt before him. Looked down at the boy’s leg. Then peered into Bass’s eyes with a plea. “Can we burn him?”

“Burn him?”

Burwell swallowed and said, “I see’d ’em do it with bad wounds back in Missouri. Put a hot poker on it, burn it so it don’t bleed no more.”

“It ain’t that he’s bleedin’, Roman,” Scratch explained, watching the realization of it strike the man doubly hard. Then he thought. “But we can do something else to burn him. Flea, get me my powder horn.”

When the boy had returned with his father’s shooting pouch and horn, Titus pulled the stopper and poured a little powder into the two puncture wounds and the cuts. As he gently kneaded the powder down into the bloody, oozing tissues, he again instructed Flea, “Son, get me a small twig from the fire.”

“Fire on it?” he asked his father in Crow.

“Yes, a good ember on the end of it.”

Roman inched back when Flea brought the tiny branch, a small flame licking at the end. Holding his breath, Titus touched the ember to the first of the wounds. A sudden twist of gray smoke spurted from the swollen flesh as Lucas twisted violently in his mother’s arms.

“Hold ’im still best you can, Amanda,” he ordered as he pressed down on the boy’s ankle with his empty hand, then gently laid the twig against the second wound.

Another spew of sparks and a curl of smoke erupted as Lucas flexed that swollen leg grown so filled with fluid that the narrow leather strip had nearly disappeared between folds of rock-hard flesh.

“We’re ready, Gran’pa,” Leah said behind him.

“Why don’cha move him onto the pallet the girls made for him, Amanda,” he suggested quietly. “Cover ’im up too.”

“You think he’s cold?” she asked as she began to lay her son on the comforters.

“He’s awready got the fever,” Bass had said. “Gonna be burnin’ up with it soon enough.”

Once Amanda had the boy settled on the soft pallet, his head in her lap, Titus creaked to his feet and inched away. He had to find Shell Woman, to beg her to use her powerful Cheyenne buffalo medicine on this dying child.

“Pa?”

He turned there at the fire, his painful reverie interrupted by the desperation in Amanda’s call. He went over and knelt beside her in the shade of the awning again. The sun was settling toward the far western hills. West … where they had been going as a happy family out to make themselves a new home in a new land with new hopes and new, new dreams.

“Something’s terrible wrong,” Amanda moaned. “He’s been restless, real restless for the last little bit—”

Titus heard the boy’s stomach lurch, that unmistakable gurgle as he instantly lunged over Amanda to grab for Lucas, getting the youngster turned on his side just before he spilled the contents of his stomach. The child whimpered when he was finished. Scared.

Bass grabbed up the wet towel they had been using to moisten the boy’s lips and wiped Lucas’s chin and mouth, then swiped it across Amanda’s arm where it had been right under her son’s mouth. “It’s all right, Pa. This sort of thing don’t ever bother a mother.”

He looked deep into her eyes, finding himself filled with so much love for her, filled with so much sorrow for her too. “Don’t bother a father neither, Amanda.”

But he had to drag his gaze away from the pain in her face, looking now at that thin, frail leg still enclosed inside the dirty canvas britches—how vastly different that leg was in its skeletal boniness compared to the pale, red-mottled leg puffed up more than twice its normal size. On the outside of Lucas’s bare calf were those two dark incisions he had made across the fang marks, powder-burnt now, both crude attempts at frontier healing made all the more stark against the youngster’s white skin. For a moment he stared down at the slits he had cut into the muscle to suck the boy. Still a little oozy with blood and seep after the burning, those slits reminded Titus of a reptile’s eyes. Eyes filled with the black of badness, glaring back at him, mocking his inability to save the boy. Sneering at his every effort to live up to Lucas’s trust that his grandfather could make all things better once more.

While Amanda continued to gently rock the child against her, humming over and over again the same few notes of some barely remembered song as a mother is wont to do when she has to watch her very flesh and blood slipping from her grasp, Titus got down on his hands and knees to smell the drying puddle of what little had remained in Lucas’s belly before the boy heaved it across himself, Amanda, and that baby quilt she had managed to get sewn just before the birth of her youngest. Leaning back, he scooped up a double-handful of prairie sand and spilled it on the rancid puddle. Several more times he filled his hands with sand and poured it out until the whole spot was buried.

Buried, he thought. Just like this woman’s gonna have to do to her baby. Sour and sickly, that vomit’s stench clung in his nostrils—proof to the old trapper that the boy was already dying inside. Oh, how his heart ached for this mother now, knowing that all too soon she would be wrapping up her baby in that very same quilt and consigning his tiny body to a shallow hole in the ground. Burying him, the way he had attempted to bury that—

“Mama …” Lucas whimpered softly, the last syllable trailing off in a moan.

“Yes, Mama’s here.” She bent her head low across his face, brushing his cracked lips with her ear.

He croaked, “Water?”

Amanda looked up at her husband. “Row, get him some water.”

Scratch studied the child’s face as Roman fetched the canteen from the sideboard of the wagon. Lucas’s face was bathed in sweat. No longer were tiny jewels beading his forehead. Now he was in the full grip of a last, excruciating fever. Amanda took the canteen, stuffed it between her knees, and started to worry the cork from the neck.

“Lemme,” Titus offered.

“I gotta pour some water on his poor tongue,” she said in desperation while she passed her father the canteen.

“No, not that way,” he said as he pulled the cork and looked around them. “Here, I’ll use the corner of your apron.”

Picking up the corner, Bass pressed it against the canteen’s mouth as he turned it upside down. Water soaked a bit of the apron. This he brought to the child’s mouth, rubbed it across the dry, cracked lips.

“Here, Lucas—suck on it. Suck the water.”

“For God’s sake, Pa!” she whimpered. “Give him a drink of water!”

“He’ll just throw it up,” he wanted to explain. “This way his tongue won’t be so dry—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Amanda snapped, her red eyes hardened with despair. “He’s gonna … Lucas is going to … it damn well doesn’t matter anymore if his stomach don’t hold it.”

He felt shamed, chastised by her words, more so by his lame attempt to do right by Lucas when the time to do anything for the child was past them all. No longer should any of them worry about the boy throwing the water back up.

“Y-you’re right, Amanda,” he said quietly, handing her the open canteen. “Give Lucas anything he wants what’11 make him feel better. Anything.”

Her eyes suddenly softened. “I’m sorry, Pa. So sorry.” And she started to cry again, her upper body quaking with the force of her sobs.

Quickly Bass threw his arm around her shoulder, saying, “Don’t do that now, Amanda. Time enough for that later. But right now … for what time you got left … you be Lucas’s mother. You just be this boy’s mama.”

When he took his arm from her shoulder and rocked back, Amanda gently raised the child and delicately pressed the canteen’s neck to Lucas’s lips. She allowed only a dribble to pour across his tongue as he swallowed again, then again, greedily. Finally he opened his eyes into cracks and she took the canteen away.

“Mama,” he groaned, barely audible. “I hurt so much.”

“Your leg?”

“Ever’ where,” he sighed, lips glistening with the last drops of water.

Titus got to his knees, then patted the pallet next to Amanda. “Roman—c’mere. Be with your people.”

For a long moment the big, burly farmer just stood there at the edge of the awning’s shadow, staring down at his son, grief relentlessly chiseling away at his sharp, thick-boned features. His arms hung stiffly at his sides, those big callused farmer hands balling into fists with a white-knuckled intensity, then opening before they balled again with a fierce helplessness.

“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 and 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 recognized 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.

“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.”