Fifty wagons and two hundred–odd folks cross the Big Blue without mishap, though we are all wet and weary when we set up camp on the other side. We are not the only ones camped along the river, and we won’t be the last. By nightfall, campfires dot the darkness, hot pokers in an inky dusk, each company making its own circle and establishing a watch over its animals, though there have already been squabbles over meandering cattle and claims of ownership when the herds mix. The Kanzas Indians who were running their ferry stroll into our camp and demand to be fed, and the emigrants are quick to oblige them. They’ve been told stories of Indian attacks and degradations. It makes them amenable to sharing their supplies. The Kanzas eye me with suspicion. They don’t know what to make of me.
“You aren’t like them.” Naomi May hands me a bowl of something that smells like salt pork and pignuts, and I wonder if I have spoken out loud. I am so startled I take her offering, though I have already eaten. I’ve drawn early watch, but the grass is abundant, and the animals graze within a stone’s throw of the nearest wagon.
“Who?” I grunt.
“Every Indian I’ve ever seen.” She shrugs.
“How many have you seen?”
She doesn’t lower her gaze, though I am trying to make her uncomfortable. It is only fair. She makes me uncomfortable.
“Some.”
“Well . . . there are many tribes.” I take a huge bite of the stew. It isn’t bad, and I take another, wanting to finish quickly so she will take her bowl and her spoon and go.
“Which tribe do you belong to?” she asks softly, and I sigh.
“I wasn’t raised in a tribe,” I snap.
“You aren’t like the white men I know either.”
“No?”
“No. You’re very neat and tidy.”
I snort, half laughing. “I was raised by a very fastidious white woman. Everything had its place. Even me.”
She eyes my freshly scrubbed face and my rolled-up sleeves. My clothes are clean—as clean as they can be—and my hair too. I know how to darn a hole and mend a tear, and there are neither in any of my garments. Naomi smooths her skirt as if she is suddenly self-conscious about her own appearance. She needn’t be. She has three dresses—pink, blue, and yellow, all homespun and unadorned, but she looks good in all of them.
“Where is your place, Mr. Lowry?” she asks, and the breathlessness in her voice makes my chest tight.
“Ma’am?” I ask, a little slow to follow.
“You said everything has its place.”
“Right now, my place is with the mules, Mrs. Caldwell.” I tip my hat and move past her, handing her my empty bowl. She follows me.
“I would prefer you call me Miss May if you won’t call me Naomi.”
“Where’s Mr. Caldwell?”
“Which one?”
“The one who made you a missus, ma’am.” I sound pained, and it embarrasses me. I know she is a widow, but I don’t know the circumstances that made her one. How long has it been? How long was she wed? I want to know, but I’m afraid to ask. And I don’t want to draw attention to myself or to her or to the fact that we’re together. Again.
I quicken my step. When she quickens hers in response, I duck behind a cottonwood where I’ve picketed Dame, hoping to shake her off. She’s as persistent as Webb.
“Daniel Caldwell made me a missus. But he died. And I wasn’t a Caldwell for very long. I never really got used to being one. I forget sometimes and say the . . . wrong . . . name,” she explains. “If you call me Mrs. Caldwell, I’ll think you’re talking to Elmeda.” She stops beside me and reaches out to Dame, who greets her with a bump of her nose and a quiet chuff.
“ka’a,” I chide softly.
“You say that a lot. What does it mean?” Naomi asks.
“It doesn’t really mean anything.”
“You say it when you sigh.”
“It’s that kind of word.” Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. It is a word from my earliest memories, something my mother would whisper when she was weary or wondering, an exclamation of nothing and everything.
“I like it.”
“You’re going to get me in trouble, ma’am,” I say under my breath.
“I am?”
“Go back to your wagon. I’m on watch. And I don’t want someone finding you with me.”
“We’re within shouting distance of a dozen campfires, Mr. Lowry. There is nothing indecent about conversation.”
I take several steps back, widening the space between us, remembering what Abbott said. She is not for you, son.
“Everything has its place,” I say, and my tone is firm.
“I’ve offended you.”
“You haven’t.”
“I did not mean to insult you when I said you were not like other Indians. I only wanted to understand you.”
“Why?”
“You act like a white man. You speak like a white man—most of the time—and yet you are not.”
“I am.” I am as white as I am Pawnee.
“You are?” Naomi sounds surprised. “You said you were raised by a white woman. Was she your mother?”
“Yes,” I say. Jennie was a mother in every sense of the word, and I don’t want to explain myself. Yet when Naomi raises luminous eyes to mine, tilting her head to the side in patient observation, I find myself doing just that.
“I was raised by my father and his wife, Jennie. Jennie is Mr. Abbott’s sister. She did not give birth to me, but she still . . . raised me.”
“Who gave birth to you?” she asks, and my temper flashes. Naomi May is the nosiest woman I’ve ever met.
“A Pawnee woman. And you are not like the rest of them either,” I snap.
“The rest of who?” she asks, mystified.
I point at the companies, the camps, indicating the people huddled over fires and tin bowls, scooping beans and bacon into their mouths. “The other women. You are not like them.”
“How many women do you know?” Her voice is wry, and I recognize my own words turned back on me. She is not cowed by me. She is nosy . . . but I like her. And I do not want to like her.
“And how am I different?” she demands.
“You are here, talking to me.” She cannot argue with that, as everyone else—except her brothers—gives me plenty of space. I know it is more my fault than theirs. I am not friendly, and I cannot be Naomi’s friend. Time to run her off.
“You don’t seem to care what anyone thinks. Either you are stupid or you are arrogant, but I can’t afford to be either one,” I say.
She flinches like I have slapped her. It is exactly what I intended. Harsh words are not easily forgotten, and I need her to hear me.
Women are trouble. They have always been trouble; they always will be trouble, a truth I learned early. When I was still a boy, dangling my feet over the lake of manhood, a woman in St. Joseph, a friend of Jennie’s—Mrs. Conway—cornered me once in Jennie’s parlor and stuck her hand down my pants and her tongue down my throat. When I froze in stunned terror, she grew impatient and slapped me. A few weeks later she tried again, and I kissed her back, curious and conflicted, not knowing where to put my hands or my mouth. She showed me, and I enjoyed myself, though when Jennie caught us, the woman screamed and bolted, claiming I’d forced myself on her. I learned then that women couldn’t be trusted and I would not be believed; the woman’s husband came looking for me, and my father gave him his best mule colt from the spring stock to soften his ire.