“I won’t keep the medicine down,” I say.
“Then just sip it slowly. The best time to drink is when you’ve just been sick,” she says, confident, calm, like she’s certain I’m going to be just fine. I believe her for a moment, and then my stomach rebels again.
I push her away once more.
“If you don’t let me help you, someone else will try, and I know you like me,” she says.
“That’s why I want you to go away,” I groan.
“I know. And that’s why I won’t. Now drink.”
Hours pass. I am hardly aware of anything beyond my own agony, yet the shadows change and the temperature too, and when I am at last delivered, the pain becoming an echo instead of a roar, Naomi is still beside me.
“I was afraid you were going to die,” she says.
She looks as ragged as I feel. Her lips are dry, her eyes are ringed, and her hair is a curling mess around her wan face.
“You’re beautiful,” I say. And I mean it. She smiles, a radiant beam of relief and surprise, and I say it again, dazzled. Her very presence is beautiful.
“And you’re delirious,” she argues.
“No.” I try to shake my head and am overcome by dizziness. I wait for the nausea, for the pain to sweep through me, but I am simply weak, simply tired, and I open my eyes when the spinning slows, finding her face above mine. I don’t think she is breathing.
“John?”
“C?ikstit tatku,” I whisper. I am well. “The pain is gone. I’m just tired.”
“Do you promise not to leave?” she asks. I know she isn’t talking about the trail or the journey west. She’s talking about dying.
“I promise.”
“Then I will let you sleep. But drink a little first.” She helps me lift my head and holds the tin cup to my lips. It is brackish, and I take little sips, willing my stomach to hold steady.
“You should sleep too,” I say. Her head is bobbing with fatigue. I reach for her hand and pull it to my chest, laying it across my heart. I must look a sight and smell even worse, but she curls at my side, her head in the crook of my arm, our hands clasped across my body, and we sleep, lost in the weightlessness of the newly pardoned.
When I wake again, I feel almost restored, though a weakness remains in my limbs, and my thirst is overwhelming. Naomi is gone, though a strand of her hair clings to my shirt.
Webb sits in the opening, the two sides of the tent making a vee above his head.
“Naomi says I’m to tell her when you wake. Are you awake, John?” he asks.
“I’m awake, Webb.”
“You’re not going to die like Abigail, are you, John? I liked Abigail. But I like you more. Don’t tell Warren. Or Pa. Pa doesn’t like you, I don’t think. He says you’ve got your eye on Naomi. Do you have your eye on Naomi, John? Naomi had a husband once. His name was Daniel. But he died too. You’re not going to die, are you, John?”
My thoughts are slow and my neck is stiff, but I manage to follow the stream of questions Webb hurls at me, shaking my head in response to the question he started and ended with. “Not right now, no.”
“That’s good.”
“Webb?”
“Yes?”
“Have you been looking after my animals?”
“Yep. I been watchin’ ’em. I picketed Kettle and the mules just like you showed me. Dame too. There’s plenty of grass just over the rise.”
“Good boy.”
“Everyone else is getting ready to move on. We’re to catch up as best we can. Mr. Abbott doesn’t want to leave you, but seeing as how the cholera is following us, he said he had to.”
“Are you all waiting on me?”
“Nah. There’s a few people sick. Lucy died. Just like Abigail, and Ma said Mrs. Caldwell is laid real low. Mr. Bingham is sick too, though he’s better than he was. Pa says we gotta move on, but Naomi says not without you. Do you think you’re well enough to ride in the wagon, John?”
“I need a drink, and I want to wash . . . without Naomi. How about we wait to tell her I’m awake, okay?”
Webb fetches a bar of soap and digs through my saddlebags for clean clothes. He keeps watch for me as I wash in the creek, stripping off my soiled things until I’m naked as the day I was born and almost as helpless. By the time I’ve washed and wrung out my clothes and dressed myself in the dry ones, I’m shivering and unsteady, but Webb slings his arm around my waist and pulls my arm over his shoulders, providing a crutch as we make our way back to the camp.
NAOMI
John often sleeps in a little tent that he breaks down and packs up each day, but when it storms or the wind blows, he finds shelter beneath Mr. Abbott’s wagon. He is among the first to wake and is usually packed and ready before the rest of us, often helping others gather their stock and yoke their teams.
I know all his habits and patterns; I have been shameless in my interest. So when I see his tent, still pitched and standing off to the side, though the camp has been stirring for hours, I know something is wrong. I stand abruptly, my duties forgotten, and stride toward it, trying not to run, to draw unwanted attention.
Crossing the distance between where I was and the little opening of his tent feels like walking another mile in the Platte, my feet on shifting silt, my legs heavy and bogged down by fear, and when I call his name, it is a shrill bleat that hurts my throat. He doesn’t answer, and I do not hesitate, parting the canvas sides and crawling inside.
It is just as I feared, and he is already vomiting, the final stages for Abigail. She didn’t last an hour after she began retching. But John has enough strength to insist I leave, enough fire to push me away, and I take heart in that.
I spend the remainder of the day at his side, leaving only to gather medicine and tell my family they will have to leave me behind until John is improved. Ma understands, Pa too, though he grouses about the impropriety of my care.
“Surely Mr. Abbott can see to his needs. After all, they are family,” he protests, but Grant Abbott keeps his distance, worried that he too will find himself ailing, and Pa says nothing more. Arguments about indecency ring hollow when death comes to call.
It ends up that the entire wagon train remains at Elm Creek, only eight miles from where we crossed the Platte two days earlier. John is not the only one stricken down by cholera. Several others, including Lucy Caldwell Hines, Daniel’s sister, have succumbed to the deadly plague. Lucy dies just before sunset.
Ma sends Webb to tell me—for some reason the children have more resistance to the disease—and I leave John’s side to stand beside a hole in the earth, watching as my sister-in-law is put in the ground by poor Adam Hines, who has the same stunned expression that Warren still wears about his eyes. She is clothed in her wedding dress, blue silk with lace collar and cuffs, and rolled in a rug instead of a winding cloth. The rug once graced Elmeda’s parlor, but there is nothing else, unless we want to start tearing apart their wagons.
Lucy said she would wear the dress again when we reached California and attended Sunday meetings. It is Sunday today, and I suppose a funeral is a sort of worship. Deacon Clarke, who is not well himself, says something akin to the words he said for Abigail, and everyone hitches out a wobbly rendition of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Ma’s the only one who knows every word. Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, darkness be over me, my rest a stone, yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to thee.