“I don’t want to sleep. Not yet. I need to think of a name for my brother. He needs a name. He deserves a name. But I think best when I’m moving, so I’m going to walk a bit. Will you walk with me?”
I groan. We walk all day, yet she wants to walk.
“I won’t ask you to kiss me again,” she says, rueful. “I promise.”
I extend my hand to help her rise. “Five minutes. We will walk for five minutes. You are weary. I am weary.”
She sighs but nods her head in agreement.
“Do you have another name, John Lowry?” she asks.
I am silent a moment, considering. Is she asking for my Pawnee name?
“Just John Lowry? No middle name?” she presses, and maybe it is the darkness and her plaintive tone, but I find myself telling her something I have never told a soul.
“My mother called me Pítku ásu’。”
“Say it again,” she whispers, and I do. She tries to copy the sounds and does a fair job of it. “What does it mean?”
“Two Feet.”
“And how do you say turtle?” she says, teasing.
“ícas.”
“I like it. But it doesn’t start with a W,” she says.
I smile, and she wilts, the steel in her spine bowing under her fatigue.
“He sounds like a wolf pup. It is the first thing I thought of when I heard his cry,” I offer.
She raises her eyes, studying me in the darkness. “My great-grandmother’s name was Wolfe. Jane Wolfe.”
“Wolfe May,” I say, testing it.
“Wolfe May,” she murmurs, nodding. “I like it. Lord knows he’s gonna need a strong name.”
“And it starts with W,” I add. She laughs softly, and my heart quickens at the glad sound.
“You should sleep now, Naomi.” Her name is sweet on my tongue, and I know I have revealed something I did not want her to see.
“I think I will, John. Thank you for helping me. Someday my brother will want to know how he got his name. I’ll tell him about you and about this journey.” She sighs and smiles faintly. “Wolfe May. Little wolf. It’s a good name.” She sounds at peace, and my heart swells at her words. I fold my arms so I’m not tempted to touch her, to comfort her further.
I do not say good night this time, but it is all I can do to walk away. I want to be near her. I duck inside the tent, where I found Webb only an hour earlier, but I do not stay there. Instead, I strip off my shirt and use a bit of soap and a bucket of water from Abbott’s barrel, scrubbing at my skin, trying to wash Naomi May from my thoughts. When we reach Fort Kearny, I will go back to Missouri, and she will continue to California. I will never see her again, and the knowledge sits like hunger in my belly, churning away at me the remainder of the night.
NAOMI
Ma resumes walking in the morning, baby Wolfe wrapped in a cloth bunting and secured to her chest. She and Pa don’t balk at the name I have chosen. In fact, they nod approvingly, recalling Grandma Wolfe, as I knew they would. I don’t tell them that it was John’s suggestion; it is a secret between the two of us. I do my best to absorb Ma’s duties for the first few days, allowing her to rest as soon as the train stops, preparing food, washing clothing, and looking after the family.
The sickness along the trail is making everyone jumpy. One family in the company loses their father and mother within hours of each other, leaving their four children, all under the age of ten, orphaned. An uncle takes them all in, only to lose his own wife the following day. The whole family—two wagons, eight children, one man, three sheep, and two teams of oxen—turns back for Missouri, a boy of fourteen at the helm of one team, and we all watch them go, stunned at the sudden wrath of death. If we were under any illusions about the difficulty and suffering we would all endure, those illusions have vanished, though I’m convinced the mind whispers little lies to us all. You’ll be fine. You’re stronger. You’re smarter. You’re better. You’ll be spared.
Daniel’s death has taught me that death is fickle and final, and it doesn’t spare anyone. It doesn’t spare us. Abigail starts the day walking beside the wagon with Ma, but by lunch she is doubled over with terrible cramps, and her bowels are so loose she removes her bloomers so she will not soil them. She insists it’s the baby she’s carrying, but she is so ill by nightfall she does not respond when we try to make her drink. Warren holds her hand and begs her not to go, but she does not wake again, and my brother becomes a surviving spouse, just like me.
We make a coffin out of the extra box seat, burying her in a shallow ravine beside a single line of trees not far from the Little Blue. John Lowry helps Pa and Wyatt dig the hole, and we mark the spot with a cross fashioned from the slats of Ma’s rocking chair. After the endless bump and sway of travel, none of us may ever want to rock again.
Ma sings a song—To the land I am bound, where there’s no more storms arising—and the Methodist deacon in the train, a man named Elias Clarke, says a few words about God’s eternal rest. But there is no rest. We are moving again as soon as the crude coffin is in the ground.
“She didn’t even want to come. She wanted to stay in Illinois close to her ma,” Warren cries. “I didn’t think there was anything for us in Illinois. I didn’t listen. Now she’s gone. Now I have to leave her in the middle of nowhere, all alone.”
We can’t console him, and by nightfall he is so ill with the same thing that brought Abigail low we fear he will follow in her footsteps. Wyatt drives his oxen, and Warren lies in the back of his wagon, inconsolable, racked by pain in his limbs and his bowels, mourning a wife who was darning the hole in his socks only yesterday. I ride with him, trying to ease his pain with remedies that don’t seem to help at all. Ma wants to tend to him, but I won’t let her. She is weak, and if Ma gets sick, Wolfe will die too. We may all die if Ma dies.
Pa asks us if we want to turn back. We are barely two weeks out of St. Joe, and life is no longer recognizable. We are walking sideways in an upside-down world. The talk of land and possibility in Oregon and California has been silenced by glum reality. Pa says we can follow John Lowry when he returns to Missouri and pay him to help us get back home. My heart leaps at that, but Ma just looks at me in that knowing way and shakes her head, though she addresses us all.
“There is nothing behind us, William,” Ma says. “We have nothing to go back to. If we turn around . . . Abigail will still be gone. Our future is out there. Our sons are going to make it to California. They are going to have a better life than the one we left. You’ll see.”
Somehow Warren holds on, but it takes us eight days to travel from the banks of the Big Blue River to the Platte. The wagon train is slowed by the death that dogs our heels, and Fort Kearny, sitting south of the shallow stretch of river, has no walls or fortifications. It’s an unimpressive, dusty encampment with corrals and barracks and cannons to keep the Indians away, though not too far away. A few lodges dot the landscape beside the main building, and I overhear talk of a Pawnee village within riding distance. The night we arrive, a group of Pawnee women, children, and old men stagger into the camp, crying and wailing. Someone says a band of Sioux attacked the village, took their animals, and burned some of the lodges. We saw the same thing along the Missouri River when we traveled from Council Bluffs to St. Joe. A band of Omaha Indians had been run from their village. Pa gave them what he could, and they continued on, mourning and moaning as though the Sioux were still behind them. I was relieved to reach St. Joseph, but the images of the bedraggled and bloody Omaha remained fixed in my memory. I sketched some of their faces in my book, trying to shake them loose. It brought them to life again, and I wished I had simply let the images fade. I’d captured anguish on paper and had no idea what to do with it.