“Is that the way it was with you and Pa?” I ask. “You just knew, right then and there?”
“No.” Typical Ma, no lies and no careful tread. “Me and Pa were more like you and Daniel.”
“Friends?”
“Yes. Friends. I liked him, though. And he really liked me. That’s always nice, when someone really likes you. And your pa, he let me know that he liked me.”
“I’ve let John know I like him.”
“I know you have.”
She is trying to tease, but I feel shame well up in my breast. I don’t want to chase John Lowry. I don’t especially like the way I want him so much. But I can’t help it.
“What if he’s a bad man . . . and he decides to let me catch him?” I worry.
“I’ve had dreams about Mr. Lowry. He’s not a bad man. But even so . . . I’m not sure he’ll let you catch him. He’s full of distrust and denial. It’s going to take patience, Naomi, patience and understanding. And I don’t know if he’s going to be around long enough for you to show him either of those things.”
I don’t know what to pounce on first, the dreams or the disappointing truth that I might be left wanting forever.
“Tell me about the dreams.”
She is silent for too long, and I sit up, bending my back with the curvature of the wagon top. I can’t see her expression in the darkness, but her eyes gleam, and I know that she is not sleeping but thinking.
“Have you ever seen a great bird come off the water?”
“Ma,” I groan, thinking her thoughts have wandered, but she continues, her voice sleepy.
“In my dreams, a big white bird lifts off the water in a great flapping of wings. As the bird rises, he sprouts the body of a man, and his wings are a feathered headdress. Like the one that Potawatomi chief was wearing in St. Joe that day. In my dream, the bird turned man walks on the water . . . like Jesus in the Bible . . . until he reaches the shore. The man has John Lowry’s face. I’m not sure what that means, Naomi, but I’ve been having that dream long before I ever met John Lowry.”
“How do you feel . . . in the dream?” I know that for Ma, the way the dream makes her feel is the most important part.
“Sad. I am so . . . sad, Naomi, but I am grateful too,” she whispers. “It’s like he has come to help us. I’m beginning to sink, like Peter, and he reaches out his hand and lifts me up.” When Ma references the Good Book, no one argues.
“Like Jesus, walking on water?” I speak so softly I can hardly hear myself, but she repeats my words.
“Like Jesus, son of Mary, walking on water.”
JOHN
Once we cross the Big Blue River, we are able to follow the Little Blue River north toward the Platte and Fort Kearny, where my journey with the company will end. The terrain is familiar—I have traveled this road before, but Naomi has not. After the noonday meal, her mother relents to riding beside Mr. May, and Naomi rides Trick, who has turned out to be a remarkably sound mule, just as my father promised. Naomi is writing in her book again; it is propped up by her satchel, which rests against the saddle horn, and her body sways with the gait as her hand moves across the page. I kissed her so she would run away, yet I am the one who seeks her out, sidling Dame up beside her to see, once and for all, what she is doing.
“You’re always writing in that book,” I say, my voice accusing. “You are going to fall.”
I try to keep my eyes forward, as if my presence beside her is happenstance.
“I’m not writing.”
When she doesn’t say more, I am forced to look at her.
She shakes her head at me, wrinkling her nose a little as she grins. Her bonnet has fallen back on her head, and the afternoon sun turns strands of her brown hair red. She’s going to have a hundred more freckles if she doesn’t fix it, but I say nothing. “I have no interest in words,” she says.
“No?” I ask.
“Not the kind you put on paper.”
“What other kind are there?”
“The kind you speak. I’m interested in those words.”
I grunt, not really understanding.
“I like a good conversation. At least with interesting people. You are an interesting person. I would like to talk to you more often.” Her brow furrows, and she frowns. “Pa says if I don’t learn to hold my tongue, I’m going to get myself in trouble. Do you think I’m trouble, John Lowry?”
“You know I do.”
She laughs.
“And don’t call me John Lowry,” I grumble. When she says John Lowry like that, it makes me think of Jennie, and I don’t want Naomi to remind me of Jennie.
“How about I call you John and you call me Naomi?”
I nod once, but I don’t think I’ll be calling her anything other than Mrs. Caldwell. Not out loud. “If you aren’t writing words, what are you doing?” I press.
“Drawing. If the pictures are good enough, you don’t need words.”
“Can I see?” I ask.
She thinks about it for a minute, her eyes on mine, like she’s trying to unpeel me. I look away. I find I can’t look at her very long. I forget myself, and my mules always know when I’m not paying attention.
“All right. But promise me one thing,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
I jerk, surprised, but I don’t think she’s teasing. She hands me the leather book and swiftly turns her head, looking forward. I don’t think she wants to watch me look through her pages. Her embarrassment, something she seemed impervious to, makes the moment more intimate, and I am suddenly reluctant to open the small clasp that keeps the pages together.
“You promised you wouldn’t be afraid,” she scolds.
I didn’t promise, but I suppose my looking means I accept her terms. I wrap Dame’s reins and the lead ropes around the horn on my saddle so my hands are both free. I open Naomi’s book, wanting to see inside more than I’ve ever wanted to see anything, yet feeling like I’m about to bed her, inclined to rush yet not wanting to cause pain.
I expect landscapes—the river, the hills, the sky, with the plains stretching out on both sides—and there are some of those, all immediately recognizable. The creeks in Kansas and the lightning-forked skies and rain-soaked swales, the dead carcasses and the littered trail of belongings strewed across the ruts. A little grave, and then another, sitting beside an abandoned chest filled with delicate bone china. She’s labeled the picture Bones in Boxes.
But it is the faces that move me.
Faces fill the pages. I recognize Naomi’s mother—a weary smile beneath knowing eyes—and her father, who the boys favor, worn and hopeful. Pictures of her brothers, Abbott, the women who walk and the children who never seem to tire. She’s even drawn the little boy, Billy Jensen, who fell off the tongue of his father’s wagon three days out of St. Joe and was crushed by the wheels before the oxen could be halted.
She notes that I have paused and glances over to see what picture I am studying.
“I wanted to give that one of Billy to his mama. But I thought it might hurt too much just yet.”