“That’s right. You’re here now,” Ma says, patting Wyatt’s sunburned cheeks.
“You did good, Wyatt,” John murmurs. “I’m proud of you.” And Wyatt can only nod, his tears creating dirty stripes across the red.
“You’re all grown up, Wyatt. All grown up,” Ma whispers. “And you’re a fine man.”
John rides in the back of Warren’s wagon for two days, too weak to do much but sleep and eat the little bit of mush I force upon him. Pa says if I am going to spend so much time alone with him, he’s going to ask the deacon to marry us.
I tell Pa, “Fine with me,” and that shuts Pa right up. I sit with John as much as I can, trying to draw as we lurch along.
“We found one of your pictures, me and Wyatt,” John says softly, and I raise my eyes from the page.
“I left five or six. Maybe more.”
“Why?”
“I was leaving you a trail,” I say. “Silly, I know. But it felt wrong to just go on without you. People leave signs and mile markers. I left pictures.” I shrug.
“I wish I’d found them all.”
“They weren’t my best. I had no trouble parting with them.”
We are quiet for a moment, me drawing, John’s eyes closed.
“Do you know the problem with your pictures?” he says after a while.
“What?” I think he’s going to criticize the many I have drawn of him.
“None of them are of you,” he answers.
John does not flirt. He doesn’t say pretty, empty things. He listens, soaking everything in. John’s a doer. An observer. And his thoughts, when he shares them, are like little shoots of green grass on a dry prairie. The flowers on the prickly pears that grow among the rocks.
“I’ve never tried to draw myself,” I muse. “I’m not sure I could. It’s hard for me to summon my own face to my mind’s eye.”
“I would like a picture of you,” he says, and I am touched by the soft sincerity in his voice. “I would like many pictures of you,” he adds.
“You can look at me whenever you like.” I realize I sound coquettish and cover my mouth, wishing I could take the words back. “You know what I mean,” I amend.
“Not anytime I want.”
“You can look at me now.” I stick out my tongue and pull out my ears, trying to make myself look as homely as I can. John just raises his eyebrows, but the silliness eases the tension that always starts to build inside of me when I’m with him. I sigh, letting it out in a whoosh.
“If I were to draw a picture of myself . . . for you . . . would you want a portrait . . . or a place? Would you want a picture on the trail or perched on Trick? Or bouncing around in this awful wagon?” I ask.
“All of those would be just fine.”
I shake my head and laugh.
“I want a picture of you sitting on a barrel in a yellow dress and a white bonnet in the middle of a crowded street,” he says, looking up at me.
It takes me a minute to remember. When I do, my nose smarts and my eyes sting, but I smile down at him.
“I’m gonna sleep now,” he says, closing his eyes.
I spend the next hour sketching the day we met, imagining myself the way he described me, but when I’m done, the arrested expression on my face reflects the way I felt when I saw him standing there beneath the eaves of the haberdashery, his arms full of packages, his stance wide, and his eyes unflinching, watching me. One long gaze, one meeting of our eyes, and I was caught. I haven’t been able to look away since.
Just like I did with Elmeda, I leave the drawing on his blanket for him to find.
8
THE SANDY BLUFFS
NAOMI
The bluffs are soft with sand, and the travel is slow, but we have no trouble finding water, though we veer north one day to avoid a swamp, hugging the low bluffs that extend for miles, only to swing south again when the bluffs push us back toward the Platte. In some spots there is ample timber, which we need for our fires, but no water for our teams. In other spots there is good water but nothing but sage or willow bushes to burn.
We hoard kindling and branches when we can; I threw a felled branch into Warren’s wagon at Elm Creek when Mr. Abbott warned us about the difficulty of finding timber on the road ahead, but the branch was infested with tiny insects. By the time we stopped for the night, the bugs had burrowed into the bedrolls and blankets. The branch made a great fire, but I had to beat the bugs out of the bedding with the broom, and even then we all had bites for days after.
Maybe it was the bugs in the bedding, but John returned to riding, his mules strung out behind him, after only a couple of days in the wagon. By the time we reach the junction where the Platte forks into two, North and South, he shows no sign of having been laid low.
Elmeda Caldwell decides to rejoin the living as well and slinks into our camp, lonely without her Lucy. It’s not pleasant to be a lone woman among men, and Ma and I welcome her after supper one night. Elmeda holds baby Wolfe for the first time, swaying to soothe him as Ma mends a hole and I sketch the dense grove across the river. Some say it’s Ash Hollow, marked on the emigrant guide we bought in St. Joe, though none of us can tell what kind of trees they are from this distance. On the north side, where we are making our way, there is only a single solitary cedar, its branches thinned by earlier trains desperate for wood. It is the saddest-looking tree I’ve ever seen, standing all alone, with nothing but plains and sky and a lazy river winding beside it. There are initials scratched in the trunk, man’s unending need to mark our presence. I was here. I AM here. This is proof.
I’m surprised the tree has survived so long. Standing alone has made it a target, and eventually, all the attention will destroy it.
“Mr. Abbott tells us we won’t see another tree for two hundred miles,” Elmeda says, her eyes on my sketch.
“I’ve never seen such a lonely place,” I say, making conversation.
“It is that. It makes a soul feel lost,” Ma says on a long sigh.
“You and Adam are both alone, Naomi,” Elmeda says softly. “Maybe you could . . . help . . . each other. Marriages have been built on less.”
My hand stills, but I don’t raise my head.
“Adam might need a little time, Elmeda,” Ma says, leaving me out of it.
“But . . . time is the one thing we don’t have,” Elmeda says. “Lucy and Abigail proved that. Gone in the twinkling of an eye.” She swallows, trying to control her emotion.
“Well then, we best spend it with people of our choosing,” Ma replies. I say nothing, but I don’t need to. Elmeda knows full well that Adam is not my choice.
“He’s got his eye on the deacon’s daughter anyway,” Elmeda says, defensive at my silence. “Lydia Clarke.”
Lydia Clarke came sniffing around Warren too, but Warren was ill. He wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Warren’s body is on the mend, but his spirit keeps tripping back to the Big Blue, where Abigail lies.
“She’s as brazen as you are with Mr. Lowry, Naomi.” Elmeda sniffs. “Lucy wasn’t even in the ground one day when Lydia started offering to mend Adam’s socks and wash his clothes.”
“Mr. Lowry washes my clothes as well,” I say, my eyes on my page, drawing a coiled snake beneath the trees wearing Elmeda’s bonnet. “In fact, he washed all our clothes, didn’t he, Ma?”