Still, as sweet as he is, as good as he is, he doesn’t want to settle at night. Maybe it’s the constant rocking of the wagon that lulls him to sleep during the day, but at bedtime, Ma and I take turns walking him so he doesn’t keep the whole company awake.
Some nights I walk to where John keeps watch—he always takes the first shift—and sit beside him, letting Wolfe fuss where no one can hear him, and we talk of stars and simple things. He’s taught me some Pawnee words. He doesn’t call Wolfie by his name, even though he chose it. He calls him Skee dee—the Pawnee word for wolf. And there are plenty of them. We’ve seen signs of the buffalo, their chips and skulls bleached white in the sandy swales, but our most frequent guests are the wolves. They lurk on the ridges and follow the trail, and Ma has dreams that they’ll drag Wolfie away.
One night, so weary I cannot stay awake, I fall asleep in the grass with Wolfe in my arms and wake without him. For a moment I don’t know where I am or how long I have slept. I can’t remember if it was I who held him last. I jump to my feet, noting John’s blanket around my shoulders, and I see his silhouette against the blue-tinged darkness. I almost cry out, caught in Ma’s nightmare. Then I see the smooth line of Wolfe’s head bobbing against John’s shoulder, an occasional hiccup blending with the lowing of the cattle and the whisper of night sounds all around. He walks with him, talking softly in a language I can’t understand, pointing at the sky and the cows, the moon and the mules, and I am overcome with grateful awe.
John is careful. He says little and rests even less. Maybe his quietude is simply the wear of long days and short sleeps, and I don’t know if he shares the same comfort in my presence that I feel in his, but I think he does. I feel more than comfort. I feel fascination and fondness and a desire to follow wherever he goes. I want to hear his thoughts. I want to look at him.
He does not touch me. He does not take my hand or sit as close as I’d like him to. Not since the day in his tent when he told me I was beautiful has he indicated how he feels, and I can only guess that his words of admiration were delirium, caused by his illness. But when I seek his company, he does not ask me to go, and when the night is deep and the camp is quiet, he talks to me. And though we do not speak of love or a life together, I am happy. I know it’s wrong to be so when Warren and Elmeda are so lonely and Ma is so worn. But John makes me happy, little Wolfe makes me happy, and my happiness makes me strong.
“How old are you, John?” I ask him one night.
“I don’t know. I think I am probably twenty-five or twenty-six.”
“You think? You don’t know when you were born?”
“No.”
“Not even the season? Your mother didn’t tell you anything?”
“I think it must have been winter. There was snow on the ground. She said when she rose from her bed after my birth, there was a single set of footprints around the lodge. The tracks were odd, like a man wearing two different shoes, and they weren’t deep even though the snow came to her knees. She followed them a ways, and they just suddenly stopped.” He is silent for a moment, contemplating.
“Who was it?” I press.
“She never discovered, but it is how I got my name.”
“Two Feet. Pítku ásu’。” I’ve been practicing.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about her,” I say.
“I don’t remember very much,” he says, quiet.
“What was her name?”
“My father called her Mary. The whites she worked for called her Mary too.”
“Son of Mary, walking on the water,” I whisper, thinking of Ma’s dream.
“Her people called her Dancing Feet. So I suppose I have a . . . part . . . of her name.”
“Why Dancing Feet?”
“When she was young, she sat too close to the fire, and the edge of her blanket caught a spark that quickly became a flame. Instead of screaming and letting the blanket go, she stamped the blaze out with her feet.”
“Like a dance.”
“Yes. That is the way most names come about. Some of the children don’t have names until they are half-grown.”
“But you did,” I say.
“Yes. I did.”
“Did she look like you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really remember her face.” He turns his palms up helplessly. “I don’t think so. I look like my father. He never doubted I was his. But . . . I think I might have her mouth. She did not smile much, but when she did, her lips would rise higher on one side. She had a crooked smile.”
I want to press for details, needing to see her in my mind so I can create her on paper, but I hold myself back, letting him study the sky in silence, searching his memory.
“Her hair was heavy . . . like a great rope. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me because I was small. I would stand behind her and put my hands in it, like it was the mane of a pony, and I would pretend to ride. Sometimes she would carry me on her back, but most of the time she would sit, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, her body bowed forward so I could lean into her and hold on to her hair. More than once she fell asleep that way, nodding away as I pretended to ride. Then I would climb into the nest of her lap and go to sleep too.”
When I give him a picture of a nodding Indian girl, a little boy at her back with his hands in her hair, a suggestion of a horse transposed over the top of them, he doesn’t say anything, but he swallows, his throat working up and down. He rolls it into a scroll and wraps it with the others I’ve given him in a piece of cloth soaked in linseed oil and dried to make it resistant to water, and when he looks up to find me watching, he gives me one of his mother’s crooked smiles.
JOHN
Five hundred miles from where we began, the formations begin to rise up out of the earth, gnarled and notched like ancient parapets washed in a layer of sand and time, abandoned castles that have become part of the landscape. We reach the Ancient Bluffs first, and a group of us scrambles up one of the cliffs after we’ve made camp. Webb manages to disturb a nest of rattlesnakes concealed in a cleft and comes running, his bare feet hardly touching the ground. I kill a few, skin them, and give Webb their rattles, warning him to keep them away from the animals. Naomi fries the rattlesnakes with a little oil and onions. The May boys all swear it’s the best thing they’ve ever eaten, though I think they’re only trying to be brave. We haven’t had any fresh meat, though every now and then someone puts up a shout of an elk sighting and there’s a great stampede out onto the prairie in pursuit.
We still haven’t seen a single buffalo, though we’ve been told tales of herds so deep and wide that they cover miles at a time and flatten everything in their path. We haven’t seen the buffalo, and we haven’t seen any Indians, not since Fort Kearny. Wyatt says he never wants to see an Indian again unless it’s Charlie, who is talked about in hushed tones of reverence. Webb even thanks the Lord for him when the Mays pray at suppertime. Webb regularly gives thanks for me too, but I’m not sure if he does that just to make me feel welcome when I consent to eat with the family, which isn’t all that often.
On the opposite side of the Platte, we can see Courthouse Rock, which recalls gladiators and Roman soldiers in a world completely removed from my own. I will have to tell Jennie when I write another letter. She read me Julius Caesar, and I was struck by the duplicity of the senate and the disloyalty among friends, all for power. Jennie just raised her eyes from the book and warned me quietly, “Always watch your back, John Lowry. People haven’t changed all that much since then. Almost two thousand years, and our hearts are the same.” She turned to Proverbs then and read a scripture, a version of which she made me and my sisters memorize. “These are the things the Lord hates. A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans. Feet that are swift in running to evil, a false witness who speaks lies, and one who sows discord among brethren.”