St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration

In the winter, our mother got hold of Fremont’s History of the Western Territories and brought the book to my father to read, and he was carried away with the idea. Mother said, O let us not go…

My father, the Minotaur, is more obdurate than any man. Sure, it was his decision, to sell the farm and hitch himself to a four-thousand-pound prairie schooner, and head out West. But our road forked a long time ago, months before we ever yoked Dad to the wagon. If my father was the apple-biter, my mother was his temptress Eve. It was Ma who showed him the book: Fremont’s Almanac of Uninhabited Lands!

Miss Tourtillott, one of the fusty old biddies in her sewing circle, had lent it to her, as a curiosity. It contained eighteen true-life accounts of emigrants on the Overland Trail, coupons for quinine and barley corn, and speculative maps of the Western Territories. The first page was a watercolor of the New Country, a paradise of clover and golden stubble-fields. The sky was dusky pink, daubed with fat little doves. In the central oval, right where you would expect to find a human settlement, there was nothing but a green vacuity.

Unflattened Pasture! the caption read. Free for the takers!

“Can you imagine, Asterion?” My mother smiled like a girl, letting her finger drowse over the page. “All that land, and no people.”

You could tell that even my mother, in spite of her sallow practicality, was charmed by the idea. Easy winters, canyon springs. No one to tell the old stories about her husband, or to poke fun at his graying, woolly bull head. She let her finger settle on the word free, the deed to an invisible life. She traced the spiky outline of the mountains, a fence that no church lady could peer over.

“Look at that, son.” My father grinned. “More grass than I could eat in a lifetime. All that space for your ball plays. Now, wouldn’t you want to live there?”

I frowned. Whenever my folks promised me something, it always turned out to be both more and less than what I had expected. My sisters, for instance. I’d spent nine months carving a fraternal whimmerdoodle, and then Ma gave birth to Maisy and Dotes, twin girls. The New Country looked nice enough, but I bet there was a catch.

Besides, we had plenty of grass already. My father had retired from his wild rodeo life, and now lived in quiet retirement. We leased a small farm, raising mostly flowers and geese, where my father had negotiated a very reasonable price on rent. The lunatic asylum was a block away, and the intervening lot was vacant. It bothered my father that we didn’t own the land outright, and my mother kept a pistol in the watering can, in case one of our gibbering neighbors ever paid us a visit. But that intervening lot was great for ball plays.

“Don’t be silly, Asterion,” my mother snorted, a habit she’d picked up from Dad. “Every member of my family lives in this town. Why, if we went west, I would never see them again in this world! My sisters, my mother…”

“Now wouldn’t that be a tragedy?”

A charged look passed between them.

Since retiring, my father has gotten to be on the largish side for a Minotaur, not fat so much as robust, and now he gathered his bulk to an impressive eighteen hands high. He pawed at the earthen floor. (Ma liked to complain about this, Dad’s cloven trenches in our kitchen. “Go do your gouging out of doors, like a respectable animal!”)

“Asterion,” my mother said, slamming the book shut. “Stop this nonsense at once.” Ma is a plain woman, with a petite human skull that calls no attention to itself, but she can be just as hot-blooded as my father. “We have a life here.”

Outside, the sun was setting, spilling through our curtains. My father’s horns throbbed softly in the checkered light. His ears, teardrop white, lay flat against the base of his skull. His expression was unrecognizable. Who was this, I wondered, this pupiless new creature? I had never seen someone so literally carried away by a desire before. All the reason ebbed out of his eyes, replaced by a glazed, animal ecstasy. If he hadn’t been wearing his polka-dot suspenders, you would have mistaken him for a regular old bull.

“And are you happy, Velina, with our life here? Have you stopped hoping for anything better?” This last bit got drowned out by the five o’clock scream from the asylum, which set our blood curdling like clockwork. My mother winced, and I could tell that Dad had a wedge in the door.

“Why not make a fresh start of it? Six hundred acres, and all we have to do is claim it. You will be the wife of a very rich husband. Think of the children! All those unwed miners — your daughters will never want for a dancing partner. Young Jacob will have a farm of his own before his twentieth birthday.”

“Asterion.” My mother sighed. She gestured around her, palms up. “Be reasonable. You’re no frontiersman. Where would we get the money for a single yoke of oxen?”

“Woman!” Dad boomed. He pushed out his flabby barrel chest. “You married a Minotaur. I’ll pull our wagon.”

“Oh, please!” Ma rolled her eyes. “You get winded during the daisy harvest!”

I was still rocking in the willow chair, slurping up milk.

“Your husband is stronger than a dozen oxen!” he roared. Dad patted his ornamental muscles, the product of flower picking and goose plucking. “Or have you forgotten our rodeo days?”

He tusked his horns at her, with a brute playfulness that I had never seen between them. Then he charged at her, herding her towards the bedroom door. And my mother giggled, suddenly shy and childlike, letting herself go limp against him. I coughed and slurped my milk a little louder, but by this time they had forgotten me completely. “We have each other,” he bellowed. “And everything else, we will learn on the Trail….”

I was startled by this, the speed with which one apocryphal watercolor was transforming our future. A minute ago, there had been an opened book, a crazy notion — we could go or we could stay — and now, not five minutes later, the book was shut. We were going. Simple as that.

We have been on the Trail for over a month now. Last night, we camped on Soap Creek Bottom. Down here, it’s all soft green mud and yellow bubbles of light. No potable water for our stock, and barely enough for us. The weeds we suck on for moisture taste bitter and waxy. Ma’s been complaining of bad headaches, and the twins have been doing most of our cooking. Basically, this means they wake up early enough to beg boiled coffee and quail eggs from the other wagons. Dotes lumps some salt into the yolk and calls it an omelet. Apparently, my sisters still haven’t mastered the pot and the spatula, that fiery alchemy, whereby “raw” becomes “food.” So help me, if I have to eat another stewed apple, I am defecting to the Grouses’ wagon.

We have joined the Grouses’ company, at my mother’s insistence. Ours is a modest wagon train, twelve families, among them the Quigleys, the Howells, the Hatfields, the Gustafsons, the Pratts, a party of eight lumberwomen, and a sweet, silly spinster, Olive Oatman, who is determined to be a schoolteacher. Olive trails the wagons on a toothless mule, each step like a glue-drip. “Hurry up, Olive!” the men yell, and the women worry in overloud voices that she’ll get lost, or fall victim to Indian depredations. But nobody invites Olive to join their family’s wagon.

In the beginning, everybody was gushing about the idylls of the open road — look at Hebadiah’s children, sitting high on the wagon! Listen to Gus, warbling on that mouth organ! Let’s sleep outside! Let’s close our eyes, and drink in the cool, violet dune glow with our skin!

But now, we spend most of our time scowling, sunk in our private nostalgia for well water and beds. It is cold and cloudy, with the wind still east. We are on a very large prairie. The few trees are stout and pinky-gray, like swine, and the scrub catches at our wheel axles, as if it wants to hitch a ride with us to somewhere greener. Dad’s back is carved solid with red welts. His skin is coming off in patches. Flies twist to slow deaths in the furry coves of his nostrils. Dad shakes his head more violently with every mile, a learned tic, to keep the buzzards from landing on his curved horns.

We keep passing these queer, freshly dug humps of soil. Ma told Maisy and Dotes that they are just rain swells, and the domes of prairie dog houses, but I know better. They are graves. Nobody leaves markers here, Clem says, because there’s no point, no chance that you will ever come back to visit the site. We have decided to count them, these tombless losses. It seems like somebody should be keeping score:

Made twenty-two miles…passed seven graves.

Everybody is coming to the grim conclusion that we have overloaded our wagons. Our necessities, the things we couldn’t have lived without just two weeks ago, are now burdensome luxuries. The whole Trail is littered with cherished detritus: heirloom mirrors, weaving looms, broken loved-up dolls. Maisy and Dotes got Dad’s permission to pitch Grandma’s empress china set at the trees. Our mother ducked the antique pestle, and cried a little bit.

At dusk, we entered a tall, shadowy belt of timber. Clem spotted an orange polecat, sinking into the mud, nibbling at the little hand of a giant clock face. Brass kettles glower in the shadows. Empty cradles line the sides of the road, rocking soundlessly in the wind.

During the day, my mother sits on the high chair, shouting instructions to my father. Maisy and Dotes sit inside, shelling peas. Both of my parents continue to implore me to ride in our wagon, but I refuse to. If my dad is sensitive to the weight of a china plate, I don’t want to add one bone to his load.

Instead, I walk in the back with the lumberwomen. I love the lumberwomen. They are widowed and ribald and sweat through their tongues, like dogs. Sometimes they let me roll inside the deep tin wells of their hunger-barrels. They ask lots of cheerful, impolite questions about Dad, which are far easier to endure than the frank horror of other emigrant children, or the veiled pity of their mothers.

“Your pa,” they holler, “he the one with the…?” Then they scoop at the air above their temples, and whistle. “Whoo-ee! What a piece of luck, that, you children taking after your mother!”

It doesn’t feel so lucky. Most times, I wish that I had been born with a colossal bull’s head, the bigger the better. People on the Trail act as if it’s just as strange, and even more suspicious, my seeming normalcy. We are freckled and ordinary, and it makes every mother but our own uneasy. I could be Clem’s brother; my sisters look just as peachy clean as their own daughters. This seems to alarm them. They wrinkle their noses slightly in our presence, as if we are the infected carriers of some hideous past.

My father is doing the heavy labor, sweating through the traces, plunging into the freezing water, into rivers so deep that sometimes only the shaggy tips of his horns are visible. But he is happier than I have ever seen him. People need my father out here. In town, there was always a distinct chill in the air whenever he took Ma to birthday parties or pumpkin tumbles, barbecues especially. But on the Trail, these same women regard him with a friendly terror. Their husbands solicit him with peace pipes, and obsequious requests:

“Mr. Minotaur, could you kindly open this jar of love apples for us? Mr. Minotaur, when you have a moment, would you mind goring these wolves?”

And I am so proud of my father, the strongest teamster, the least mortal, the most generous.

Ma is, too, even if she won’t admit it to him. She told Louvina Pratt that he looks like the Minotaur she married, before he was a father. It’s hard for me to imagine, staring at my dad’s gray belly hair and blunted horns, but I guess he was a legend once. At the early rodeos — my mother keeps all of his blue vellum posters, hidden inside her Bible — he bucked every gangly cowboy on the circuit. The Pawnee gave him top billing:

The bronco with a human torso, a chipped left horn, and a questionable pedigree!

Back home, people told so many stories about my father! Especially those people who had never seen him perform. That he was a sham man, or a phony bull; that his divinity had been diluted by years of crossbreeding with wild cows and “painted ladies.” My own cousins called him a monster. I always wished that they could see my dad just being my dad, covered in goose dander, or pulling a wheelbarrow of poppies. Here on the Trail, people are finally getting to know all the parts of him.

As for my mother: well, things could be better. She spends most of her time gathering twigs and buffalo excrement, and saying terrified prayers with the other women. Her face is brown and wizened, like apple skin left in the sun. She looks shrunken, stooped beneath the absence of small pleasures: fresh lettuces, the seasonal melodies of geese, the anchored bed she used to share with my father. I think she even misses the asylum, its predictable madness.

Ostensibly, the women meet behind the wagons to beat laundry with rocks or plait straw grass into ugly hats. But mostly, they just make implications.

“Velina, you must be so proud of your husband, pulling your wagon.” Louvina smiles. “My Harold would never consent to walk in the traces.”

“Yes, Velina,” the Quigley sisters chorus. “Why, he’s just as good as any oxen!”

“Our husbands are going to kill themselves out there,” my mother snaps. All of her wrinkles point downwards, like tiny pouting mouths. “It makes no difference if they are pulling or driving. We are going to forfeit every happiness we had, for a bunch of empty scrub.”

“Don’t pay her any mind,” my dad laughed later. We were sitting on the outskirts of the campfire, watching the other men dance around its pale flames. Dad was working ancient, alluvial pebbles out of his hooves, and handing them to me for my collection. They are a translucent yellow, pocked by lacy erosion, like honeycomb. Children toddled towards our log, playing slow games of tag. The stars were impossibly bright.

“Velina can’t see the West the way I can.”

Dad claims that human women are congenitally nervous and shortsighted. “Like moles, son. If your mother is hungry for green corn, or if her bloomers get wet from the dew, she forgets all about the future. Believe me, when we crest those mountains and she sees the New Country…listen, everything will be different when we get there, Jacob. I promise.”

That much, at least, I believe….

We have lived a string of dull, thirsty weeks. Everybody is irritable, and looking for someone to blame. Our wagons bump along, a pod of wooden leviathans, eaten away from the inside by mold and wood-boring mites. Our road is full of tiny perils, holes and vipers, festering wounds. Today would have been indistinguishable from the twenty before it, except that Clem and I finally got a good ball play going.

As soon as we got done striking camp and picketing the horses, we went exploring. Just north of the campsite, a quarter mile downstream, we found a clearing in a shallow stand of pines. In the center, a shrunken lake, an unlikely blue, was fringed with radish reeds. Behind us, you could see the white swell of the wagon sails, foaming over the trees. And the sky! The sky was the color that we’d been waiting for, our whole lives, it felt like. An otherworldly alloy of orange and violet, the one that meant a thunderstorm at sundown, and night rain for our stills.

“Look!” I pointed to the rising storm, a spider tide of dust and light. Future rain, cocooned in red filaments of cloud. “Clem! See that? My dad says that in the old days—”

“Jacob”—Clem rolled his eyes—“just play the ball, okay?”

Ma had insisted that I take Maisy and Dotes so that they could get some fresh air, which I found infuriating, since they are girls and should be doing girl things, playing mumbly-beans or wearing yellow ribbons somewhere unobtrusive. Clem and I propped them up against some nearby boulders and used them as yard markers.

“Ready, Jacob?”

I swung wide, sending the ball to a delirious altitude, high above the blazing aspens. Maisy and Dotes clapped politely, while Clem ran off to retrieve the ball. A second later, we heard a terrible roar from behind the trees. The aspens started quaking, and I scurried to join him. We peered through the golden leaves.

“Hey,” Clem said. “Isn’t that your dad?”

My father was shedding his summer hide. His work shirt was hanging from a green sapling. Black fur caught like bits of cloud on the low branches. And there was my dad, rubbing his head right into a bifurcated stump, his horns sparking against the wood. “Uhhhh,” he groaned, scratching harder, his back spasming with pleasure.

“No,” I lied.

He snapped up when he heard my voice. “Boys!” He stamped. I felt traitorous, and embarrassed for everybody; Dad preferred to take care of his animal functions in private. “What are you doing out here?”

“Hi, Jacob’s dad,” Clem squeaked. “We were just having a ball play with the twins.”

We all turned. The girls had wandered down by the lake, to attend to their own functions. Maisy had unfolded the gingham curtain of modesty, and was holding it up for Dotes. When she looked over and saw us watching, she squealed and let go. The curtain of modesty went flapping off in the wind, revealing a horrified Dotes, bare-legged and squatting in the purple brush.

“Eeee!”

Dotes dove behind a rock.

“Good Christ,” my father grumbled, looking away. “Get your bloomers on, Dotes.”

On the Trail, propriety is a tough virtue to keep to, even if your curtain of modesty is made of the heaviest fabric — buffalo flannel, or boiled wool.

My father snatched his own thick shirt from the tree, and started buttoning up. He plucked at the pink, scabby spots around his ears and neck — they startled me, these hairless patches, they looked so much like my own raw skin. He avoided our eyes.

“Who told you to take the girls out here, Jacob?” he bellowed. “Who gave you permission to leave the company?”

“Ma did.”

“Oh. I see. Well.” He glanced at Clem, scowling through a nimbus of bull fluff. “I say they go back.” Then Dad trotted down to the creek, to where Maisy was wringing out the sodden curtain, and swept the girls up in his arms. He took long, regal strides back towards the camp, poised and paranoid, the way he walks when he suspects that he is being watched.

Afterwards, we couldn’t find our ball. We both sat on a log, sulking, staring into the coming storm, and waiting to be called for dinner. Our bellies grumbled at the same time. A cloud of pollen floated past.

“Hey,” Clem demanded, “how come you don’t look like your dad?” It was spoken as a challenge, sudden and accusatory, as if we had been fighting all this while.

“What? But I do!” I pulled at my nostrils and blew, a nasally mimicry of my father’s anger. “I do! How come you don’t look like your dad?” I tried another wild snort, but it came out sounding like a sneeze.

Clem just smiled at me, aping his own parents’ expression, a doughy swell of pity and smug piety. He patted my back. “Poor Jacob. Bless you.”

That did it. I charged him with my invisible horns, and suddenly we were fighting in the dirt like animals, dunced into a feral incomprehension. Kicking and scratching and biting, full of a screaming joy, hot and ugly. We kept at it until the dinner bell returned us to our selves; and suddenly, as if by magic, we were back at the camp, gorging on buttered oats and quail cakes, full-bellied, and friends again.

That night, I found my father at the edge of the campfire. The company was having a barbecue, and this always makes my dad uncomfortable. The teamsters tore into the antelope meat like savages. The men wore linen work shirts during the day, but at night they stripped to their bare chests. Then they rushed at each other, half in jest, tipping their bottles back with a taut fatigue. In the center of the corral, Olive had hiked her skirts up, drunk and merry. She was sitting on Gus’s lap, slapping a tambourine against her bare knees. The wives sucked air through their teeth, flushed with scandal, and clapping along all the while.

“Dad? Will you cut my hair?”

“Sure, son.” This was our favorite ritual. He put on his reading spectacles, and removed a tiny pair of scissors from his belt. Then he started cutting at my curly mop of hair. He cut with a tender precision, squinting furiously, his thick tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

When he finished, he held the cold, flat edge of the scissors against my scalp. “Can you feel your horns, son? There?” And I smiled happily, because I could feel them, throbbing at my temples, my skulled, secret horns. Ingrown, but every bit as sharp. And I knew that no matter what Ma or Clem or anybody said, I was my father’s son.

We had our first true storm last night. Acres of lightning! A smokeless heat, and the choking smell of ash and sage. The wide, roiling prairie announced itself in liquid glimpses, apocalyptic and familiar. We had been sleeping in tents outside, and now we all ran for cover. Blue discs of hail blew into our wagons. The soaked canvas shuddered; and this became indistinguishable from the tremors within our own divided bodies, the hollow vibrato in our spines and human skulls and bellies, during the thunder.

“Mother,” I said, to say something.

I had been eagerly awaiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods — these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are. As it turns out, I am still just a buff-colored calf to Dad. I watched the older sons and brothers leaping off of the wagon tongues all around me, a shoeless stampede. There went Clem, in a peppery cloud of dust. There went Obadiah, eager to assist.

But none of the fathers called me out of the wagon, least of all my own. I huddled with my mother, nuzzling into her neck, while the men shouted commands to one another, weighting the wagon boxes so that they wouldn’t leak or capsize. Our family was in good shape. Months before we set out on the Trail, Mr. Gustafson had come over and treated our cover with linseed oil, until the canvas shone like opal. Now we could actually see the accumulation of each raindrop, held in an oily suspension above our heads. It was freezing inside our wagon. I peered through the cloth portal, searching for my father, lost in a haze of swung lanterns and the wind. The wagon train blurred and shifted around us, like a serpent uncoiling.

The twins kept on crying in fright, and all around us the treasures we had sewn into the pockets of our wagon cover were shaking loose, pewter spoons and wooden toys, a grainy mess of stone meal, my father’s musket. It’s a wonder it didn’t go off and kill someone. My mother, cold and comfortless, was cursing “our luck,” by which she meant the gods, my father, all fathers. I thought about my hard bed, and the many things I used to hate about our old life — keeping the Sabbath, harvesting the roses, all the honking, stupefying demands of our geese — and wished and wished that we had never left.

We think the wolves got Olive. When the rain cleared, she had disappeared. The grown-ups all screwed their faces into identical grimaces. They tried to make their sorrow sound as genuine as their surprise. “Poor Olive!”

Jebediah Hatfield found her mule in a ravine eight miles to the west of us, grazing on an abstemious circle of brush, its grizzled snout stained red from the berries. Torn yellow ribbon hung from the low branches. There were bits of a woman’s skirt clinging to the currant bushes. My dad volunteered to lead the search party.

“Are you mad?” Mr. Gustafson shook his bushy head. “We could lose a whole day if we send a search party. At this rate, we’ll never make it to the New Country.”

My dad looked from face to face, incredulous. “What is wrong with you people?” His horns were shaking involuntarily, no longer a mere tic, but an obvious compulsion. His voice sounded small and human. “What about the contract?”

Before we left, we had Reverend Hidalgo officiate our wagon union. Every family had to sign the contract: many wheels, a single destination, all for one until the Trail’s end.

Somebody snickered, a thin, hysterical sound. “The contract, Mr. Minotaur?” And I flushed, seeing my father the way the other men did, his puzzled, hairy face, his dumb cow eyes.

Our company took a group conscience, and most everybody agreed it to be hopeless. My father and half-blind Clyde were the only ones who voted in favor of sending a search party, and Clyde later insisted that he had just been stretching.

“Think about it, Mr. Minotaur,” Mr. Grouse said with a dark twinkle in his eye, fingering the ribbon. His cheeks were flushed, as if he were telling a naughty joke. “What solution could there be to this mystery? Who wants to waste half a day, burying the answers?”

“Velina!” We all turned. Mrs. Grouse was squatting a few yards away, waving frantically at my mother. She reached into a rain-soaked satchel, and held up one of Olive’s lacy, begrimed shirts. “Velina, do you want this? I think it’s your size.”

Yesterday, my father was the last wagon but one to cross the Great Snake River. We rafted across in the boxes, jowl to elbow, crammed in with albino cats and babies and buckets of bear grease. The men swam alongside their oxen. Clem and I banked first, and sat watching our fathers from the opposite shore. I didn’t want to tell Clem, but I was very scared. The cows had churned up a crimson froth of silt and mud, water rising to their necks, and I lost sight of my father in the lowing melee, his ruby eyes, his chipped left horn. For a horrifying instant, I couldn’t tell him apart from the regular cattle. I worried that the other men, preoccupied with their own stock, wouldn’t know to help him if he started to go under.

“Do you ever worry that your pa won’t make it?” Clem asked carefully. His own father was struggling below us, his gum boot caught in the rapids. “I mean, to the end of the Trail?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Of course he’ll make it. My father is a legend.”

All my life, I have believed only the best parts of my father’s myth. But as it turned out, this belief makes little practical difference on the Trail. Dad still got the chills, and had to stop and catch his breath on a small rock island. I got a fire going, and my mother knelt in the sand, wringing the water out of the furry knots of hair around his neck. She murmured something into his wet, mud-rubbed ears. I don’t think it was a soothing something. Even now, they are fighting inside our wagon:

“Who do you think you’re fooling out there, acting like you’re immortal? I should have listened to my mother! I should never have married a Minotaur!”

Ma likes to talk as if she could have done better than my father. All of my aunts married postmasters, and prim, mustachioed mayors.

“Your mother,” my father snorted, between a laugh and a sneer. “You women, you’re all alike….”

“It’s not too late, you know. It’s never too late to turn the wagon around—”

“Listen, Velina,” my father is saying. “I’m telling you, it’s too late. We can only go forward. Our geese have been eaten. There are strangers living in our house….”

There is some wooden clattering that sounds angry and deliberate, and an iron shudder. Then silence on my mother’s end.

For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore.

Today, we nooned in a purple grove, along the dry riverbed of Snail Creek. It was cool and pleasant. After biscuits, I found a dead snake, and skinned it, and made a toy out of its rattler to give to my sisters. They are both quarantined in the wagon, sick with ague. Their heads are swollen and bluish, like tin balloons. Maisy coughs less than Dotes, but Dotes is better at keeping boiled peas down. My parents haven’t spoken to each other for three days.

“Hey, Clem?” I asked him. “What does your father talk about with your mother? You know, in your wagon?”

“Huh.” Clem frowned. “Your folks talk to each other?” He shrugged. “My mother mostly bangs pans around, or folds the blankets real loudly. Sometimes they pray together.”

Without anybody taking verbal notice, in imperceptible increments, we have slipped to the back of the company. After the third time Dad fainted, Mom quietly stepped down from the high seat and slid into the canopied box. Now Ma refuses to drive our wagon. She curls up with the girls on a feather ticking, and sleeps during the day. It has fallen to me, now, to drive my father.

Every morning, I wake up at dawn. The sky is still prickled with stars, and it will be a full hour before the first blue ribbon of smoke gasps up from the first campfire. I shake my father awake, and help him into the traces. It’s a special, single yoke, made to order. My father drinks a tiny glass of flame-colored liquid, his breakfast, while I clasp the collar slip around his neck, and secure the nails in his crescent shoes. Then I take the reins. I’m okay once we get rolling, but I’m still uncertain, a herky-jerky greenhorn, when it comes to the commands for stopping and starting:

“Gee? Oh! I mean…Haw! Sorry, Dad!”

Even when I close my eyes, now, I see the outline of my father’s back, swaying in front of me: the bent, pebbled steppe of his vertebrae, bruise-purple from sun and toil, the shock of his bull’s mane tumbling out of his hat, bleached to the color of old milk.

Gus traded his mouth organ for a sock and a sack of millet, so now we travel in silence. I miss the camaraderie of that first prairie, everybody traveling with a single aim, to the same place, and music even on the worst days. The lighter our wagons get, the quieter our daily sojourn becomes, and the more determined we are to get there and be rid of one another. The lumberwomen are mute and sour, except for the hollow growl of their hunger-barrels. At night, after we make camp, they break long bouts of wordlessness to ask for whiskey and matches and soda crackers, and various other Trail alms.

“Don’t you give them anything, Jacob,” my mother hisses. “Remember, if you give those women so much as a single cracker, you are taking it from your sisters’ mouths.”

Lately, my parents can’t seem to agree on the value of things. Last night, well after eleven o’clock, my father trotted back to our wagon, bashful and out of breath, fresh from a barter with the local Indians.

“Velina! Open your mouth, close your eyes, I have for you a great surprise….”

Then he put a raw kernel of corn on her tongue, and waited, beaming, for her reaction.

My mother smiled beautifully, rolling the kernel in her mouth. “Oh, Asterion! Where did you get this?”

“I sold our whiffletree,” Dad said proudly. He pulled an ear of green corn out of his back pocket and, with a magician’s flourish, stroked her cheek with the silky husk.

“You what?” My mother’s eyes flew open. She spit corn in his face. “You did what?” Then she took hold of his horns and drew him towards her, slowly, half laughing and half crying, pressing her face against the white diamond at the bridge of his nose. “You did what?”

Dad’s nostrils flared; he lowered his head and pawed at the caked dirt. I dove into the wagon and slid beneath the blankets with my sisters. The candles had guttered out, but moonlight seeped through the rips in our wagon bonnet.

“Girls?”

Maisy opened one brown eye and held a finger to her lips. Dotes had her fist in her mouth, stifling a cough. I felt proud and sad that my sisters knew enough to pretend to be asleep. Outside, our parents were still arguing:

“Is that what we’re worth to you,” my mother was yelling, “five dollars and an ear of green corn?”

“…besides, you were the one who said you wanted corn….”

“Do you even have any idea how to repair a whiffletree, Asterion?…Well, I hope that is some consolation to you, when the wolves are gnawing on your daughters’ bones….”

“C’mon,” I said, loosening the cinched portal and sneaking my sisters out the back. I carried them over to the Grouses’, two wagons down.

“Hey, Clem,” I said. “Can we sleep in your wagon tonight?”

“No,” Clem said sadly. “No, my ma says that we’re only allowed to be friends in church now. They think your dad gave me lice.” He brightened. “You can sleep under the wagon.” We all peered beneath the hickory box. The under-carriage of the wagon was white and wormy. Light leaked through the planks, a palsied glow, sopped up by a dark mosaic of soil. In the dead center, the darkness pooled and shifted. Dotes gasped. It was a clotted mass of dogs, spotted dogs, yellow dogs, swimming dogs, all huddled together for warmth.

“You first,” Maisy said.

Today I was poking at the fringes of the campfire, gathering stones for my collection, when I overheard some of the other men talking about my father.

“That Minotaur is spreading sucking lice to the children!” Mr. Grouse said, shaking and red, with a rage out of all proportion to his insect allegation. “He is titillating the milk cows, and curdling our children’s milk!” I flattened myself against the ground and inched forward. The other emigrants were all frowning and nodding. Watching them, I could see the way Mr. Grouse’s anger spread from man to man, the hot, viral coil of it, a warmth the men breathed in like a welcome fever.

It’s enough to make you hate people.

I ran off to find Clem. He was out back, catching lizards behind the corral.

“Howdy-howdy, Jacob…Ow!”

I butted him in the ribs, sharply, wishing fervently that I had inherited my father’s antlered might. I butted him once, twice, and then stomped on his buckskin shoes.

“What was that for?”

“If you don’t know, I am not going to tell you.” I ran off into the sunset, crying hot, frustrated tears, cursing the Grouses at the top of my lungs. Then I lost sight of the wagons, and got scared, and ran back. I hoped Clem wasn’t watching.

When everybody was ladling soup at the bean cauldrons, I snuck into Clem’s wagon. I stole his sisters’ dolls, the ones the Grouse girls have been making out of cornhusks since Fort Charity, and ate them. In my vengative fury, I forgot to remove the button eyes. My stomach is still cramping.

I hope the West is big enough for us to really spread out. It’s a terrible thought, one of my worst fears, that we are going to get there, and these people will still be our neighbors.

Three nights ago, I was sleeping under my own family wagon, my bare arms and face covered in a fine cedar dust from the box, and dreaming of the most ordinary things, chalk and pillows and ceiling boards, pitchers of lemonade and gooseberry pies, when I woke to a hand — not my own — pinching at my cheek.

“Wake up, Jacob.”

I rolled over, eye level with the tip of my mother’s caulked boot. I slid out from under the wagon. Ma had Maisy in one arm and Dotes in the other. Their eyes looked shiny and protuberant; their throats bulged with the echo of swallowed coughs. I felt the danger, too, sensed it with an animal intuitiveness, and froze.

“Come out of there, Jacob.” My mother spoke in a low, careful tone. “Come gather your things.”

“Why?” I was surprised at how alert I sounded, wide awake, without a trace of grogginess.

“Circumstances have obliged us,” she glanced nervously over her shoulder, “to part ways with your father.”

I gaped up at my mother, and let her words sink in. I’d known for some time that a change was coming; I welcomed the idea of it, I wanted it, almost, or tried to want it, like my ambivalent prayers for rain in open country. But parting ways! This was a lunatic move, ghastly and extreme, like digging up coffins because we needed some wood.

“Jacob,” she pleaded. “Now.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. I drew my blanket up around my chin, flat with panic, and wedged myself under the carriage.

“No.”

Ma bit her lip miserably. She squatted in the dust, inches from my face. I could see my name, two puffs, in the chilly air.

“Ja-cob!”

I linked my arm around a wheel axle, and glared at her, daring her to try to grab me. The spokes shifted, ever so slightly, sending up a pearly exhumation of sand and flint. A light came on in our wagon.

“Velina? Is that you?”

With a soft, defeated cry, my mother rose to her feet. She glanced down at me a final time, pressing her hand to her cheek. Then she stumbled back towards my father’s voice, the amber penumbra of our wagon.

The Trail is full of surprises. The following morning, Mr. Grouse announced that two wagons had deserted our party, the Quigleys and the Howells, heading back east. My mother was seated by the campfires, boiling water for porridge, and she received this news without so much as a huh, an anesthetized murmur. I waited for her to look up at me, but she just sat there, staring blankly at the bubbles.

And then, just when I was at my most muddled, besieged by all sorts of flickering, waxy fears, another surprise. Through the orange transparency of our tarp, I saw my parents’ silhouettes, blurring together into a single, monstrous shadow. I held my eye up to a hole in the cover. Dad’s head was in my mother’s lap. His great eyes were shut. My mother had an iron bucket, and a thin, dirty kerchief. She was daubing a whitish solution of borax, sugar, and alum onto the sores beneath his fur. My dad was running his long, rough tongue over her boots, licking up the lichens and the toxic-colored spoors. His horns scraped against the floorboards. “I love you,” my mother kept muttering, over and over, pushing the rag into his wounds, “I love you,” as if she was trying to torture the true meaning out of the words. My father groaned his response.

So much of what passes between my parents on the Trail is illegible to me. It’s as if they speak a private language, some animal cuneiform, pawing messages to each other in the red dirt. During the day, my father continues to pull our wagon forward. My mother hasn’t spoken of that evening since….

Mr. Grouse’s oxen died in their traces today. They were a team, his beloved blue-ribbon leaders, Quick and Nimble. It took three men to cut them loose. All I could focus on was the coiled rope, slack and slick with blood, and the thought that Clem would probably not be interested in ball plays for a while. All the mothers shielded our eyes, and scooted us towards the wagons. They said that the oxen had “failed in the traces,” their euphemism to protect the youngest children, which seemed a little silly to me, since everybody had to step over a big dead ox.

“Ma,” Dotes asked, making a paper daisy chain in the wagon, “if I die, promise you’ll dig a grave deep enough so the wolves can’t get at me?”

My mother looked up from her knitting with a bleary horror. “Oh, sweetheart”—she poked her head out the wagon—“are you hearing this, Asterion?”

We all looked outside, to where Dad was standing in high, dun-colored grasses with the other men. They directed, while he used his hooves to tamp down some perfunctory dirt over Nimble. Lately, the men’s requests have grown a lot less obsequious. Just the other day, Vilner Pratt persuaded my father to wear a silver cow bell so that the company will know when he’s coming. (“You have a tendency to sneak up on a man, Mr. Minotaur.” Vilner shrugged, with an aw-shucks sort of malice. “And to tell you the truth, it spooks our women.”)

At the sound of my mother’s voice, our father looked up, and waved. His horns and hide have darkened to a dull yellow-gray; the skin hangs loosely from his arms.

“Ma,” Maisy asked, sucking on the fizzled wick of an old flare. “Is Dad going to fail in the traces?”

There was a time when my mother would have said no, and reassured us with shock or laughter. These days, she leaves our hair unwashed and our questions unanswered. “How should I know, Maisy? What can I know? You go and ask your father. You go and tell your father,” Ma said, her eyes glinting like nail heads, “what you are afraid of.”

Finally, we have reached the bluffs. From up here, we can see the midway point, the alkali desert of the Great Sink. It’s a tough landmark to celebrate. The Great Sink is a weird, treeless terrain. Even the clouds look flat and waterless. A wide, dry canal cuts through the desert, a conglomerate rut, winnowed out by a thousand wagons. It looks as if someone has dug out the spine of the desert. The Great Sink reminds me of home, an Olympian version of the trenches that Dad used to paw in our kitchen. When I mentioned this to Ma, she laughed for the first time in many days.

This patch of our journey feels like a glum, perpetual noon. The lumberwomen are in low spirits; there is no wood for them to hack at. Suddenly, their curses sound hoarse and sincere. Wolves skulk around our wagons by day, just beyond rifle shot. Clem and I scare them off by singing hymns and patriotic ditties. Above us, the pale sky is greased with birds.

Inside our wagon, Dotes shivers beneath three horsehide blankets. Maisy sleeps and sleeps. Yesterday, Ma wanted us to stop, but my father was afraid of losing the company. At night they stepped outside again, to take a spousal conscience. Ma made me hold up the curtain of modesty, now soiled and tissue-thin, as a courtesy for our neighbors.

“Do you see any doctors around here?” Dad asked, making a big show of looking under a rock. He squeezed the rock in his fist, crushing it to powder. “Any medicine? Be brave, Velina. We have to press on now, we are over halfway there—”

He broke off abruptly. I had lowered the curtain. My arms were tired, and I had to itch my nose. Our eyes met, and my father saw something in my expression that made him trot over.

“Jacob.” His teeth were shining. He wobbled a little, eyes burning, his hair on end, full of a radiant, precarious cheer, like our town drunk. He touched the nick in his horn to my cheek.

“Don’t pay her any mind, son. We’ll get there. Have a little faith in your father.”

Then he picked me up and waltzed me through the ashes of our campfire. “Hold on, son!” He charged around and around the corral, making his shoulder muscles buckle and snap like oilcloth, an impromptu rodeo. “Gee!” I pleaded, giggling in spite of myself, “Haw!”

“Don’t let go!” I yelped, even though I was the one holding on to his horns.

Then Dad spun me away from my mother, beyond the edge of our camp. We waltzed straight to the edge of the bluff.

“Look at that, Jacob.” He whistled. “Look how far we’ve come.”

Viewed from my father’s shoulders, the desert stretched for eons, flat and markerless. It was an empty vista, each dune echoing itself for miles of glowing sand. A silent, windless night, where any horizon could be the West. The heat made me mistrustful of my own vision: I couldn’t be certain if the blue smudges I saw in the distance were mountains, or mirages. The wagon trains camped below us were no help. With their snubbed, segmented ends, they looked like white grubs, curling into themselves, each head and tail identical. Tiny fires spangled the dark.

“Do you see, now?”

I peered into the desert.

I had no idea what my father saw out there, or what he wanted me to see. Still holding on to his horns, I pivoted, slow and halting, in a direction that I desperately hoped was West.

“Oh! Yes!”

Dad grinned. The firelight limned the absent places in his hide, the burn marks in his skin. Some of his bull’s hair had come off in my fist. He lowered me to the ground, and then whispered directly into my ear, as if this was a secret between men:

“They say the clover grows wild all over the West, Jacob. So green, so lush and dense! So high, son, that when you wade through it, it covers your face….”