“Why?” I’m trying not to lose my temper.
“Because eventually, time thinks for us. It cuts through the fog of emotion and delivers a big bowl of reality, and feelings don’t stand a chance,” John says with bleak finality.
“Then why are you here? Why didn’t you turn around at Fort Kearny, if you’re so sure about who I am? I thought we had an understanding.”
“I’m here because I have thought it through. I’ve thought you through.”
“You’ve thought me through?” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re the woman I want. I won’t change my mind on it. I won’t ever want something different.” He pauses and enunciates the next words. “Someone different. I’ll always want you.”
I stare at him, stunned and stirred, right down to the soles of my aching feet.
“But I’m not going to kiss you again . . . not anytime soon. And I’m not going to pretend you’re mine. I’m not going to hold your hand or tell you that I love you. And I’m not going to let that preacher say the words over us.”
The joy that coursed through me only minutes before disintegrates like it never was, so completely gone I can’t even recall what it felt like.
“You don’t know me at all,” I whisper.
His eyes search mine, but I cannot tell what he is thinking. “I know you. And I’m sure. But I want you to be sure.”
“I’ve told you how I feel.” I swallow back my anger and my disappointment, refusing to cry out my frustration.
He nods. “I know. And I don’t question how you feel.”
“You just question what I think,” I say flatly. “Or whether I think. Or if I’m even capable of deep thought.”
“Naomi,” he says, the word filled with protestation. “I will not ever be an obligation again. My mother did not have a choice of whether she wanted me. Most women don’t. My father . . . did his duty. Jennie too. I know that is what life is about. Duty. Responsibility. There is great value in that. But I want you to see all your choices . . . and still want me.”
“So all the way to California, huh? No kisses. No promises. No love. Just waiting. Waiting until you decide that I’ve thought us through long and hard. How long do you think that will be, John?” My words wobble with anger, and my heart is so hot with outrage I want to clap my hands over it so it doesn’t disintegrate and leave a gaping hole in my chest.
“As long as you need.”
“You’re a fool, John Lowry. I keep throwing myself at you. I keep telling you exactly what I think. I’ve never tried to keep it from you. I don’t have much. My dresses are worn out. My shoes too. I don’t have a husband or a home or even my own pots and pans. I don’t have much,” I say again, “but I have my pride. And I am not going to beg.”
JOHN
I have hurt her. I have known Naomi May—I still can’t call her Naomi Caldwell and probably never will—for two months. Two of the hardest months of my life. Two of the worst. Two of the best. I’ve almost died, and I’ve never been more alive. I’ve told her things no one else knows. I’ve laughed. No one and nothing makes me laugh. But Naomi makes me laugh.
And I have hurt her.
She’s been quiet. More than quiet. She’s avoided me altogether. I can’t blame her. She tells me she wants to lie with me, and I tell her no. She tells me she’s ready to be my wife, right now, wagon train and all, and I tell her not yet.
I am a fool, just like she said. I should swoop her up, claim her, bed her, and make sure no one can ever take her away from me. It’s what I want. But it isn’t what I want for her.
I didn’t explain myself very well. I insulted her intelligence and caused affront. Yet thinking back on my words, I don’t know how I could have said it any differently. I meant what I said. I just didn’t say all the things I could have.
I could have told her I want to lie with her and kiss her more than I want to breathe. That I want to make her smile and talk to her in the darkness. I could have said I want to be with her too. She’s the reason I’m here, the only reason I didn’t turn back at Fort Kearny and go home. But I didn’t tell her those things, and I have hurt her.
California is still so far away.
11
THE SWEETWATER
JOHN
I do not dream in English, and I do not dream in Pawnee. My dreams are like my childhood, garbled with sounds and gestures that belong to both of my worlds—or all of them. My mother worked among whites from the moment I was born. I heard English. I understood it. I heard Pawnee; I understood it. But sometimes what I understood I could not speak. When I went to live with my father, I hardly said anything at all. Not for a long time. Not because I did not understand, but because the words of my mother and the words of my father both danced in my head. Sometimes the words would fade and grow faint in my head. Then I would return to my mother’s village and sit at my grandmother’s feet, listening until the words were bold again. I started being less afraid when I realized that the Pawnee words always came back. Through the simmering soup of languages in my head, the words would sink like meat into my mouth, heavier than all the others. Then the world of my mother would open back up to me, if only for a while.
As I grew older, there were more sounds and more languages.
A man of the Omaha tribe worked with my father for a while. A Potawatomi village sat a mile from the farm my father sold. A Kaw woman did the wash for Jennie when we moved to St. Joe, and there was Otaktay, the half Sioux who taught me to fight. When Abbott came back from California, he traveled with some trappers from Fort Bridger. One had a young Shoshoni wife who made it all the way to Missouri only to be abandoned in an unknown world when the trapper died suddenly a day out of Independence. Abbott brought her to Jennie, who made her a little room in the cellar and put her to work. The Shoshoni woman reminded me a little of my mother, industrious and unassuming and completely lost. She knew a little sign talk and a few words in English, but Jennie was convinced I would be able to talk to her and dragged me around to interpret, though I’d never heard Shoshoni before.
“You have the gift of tongues, John Lowry,” Jennie told me. “You always have. It won’t take you long.”
There were sounds that were the same and sounds that weren’t, patterns that I recognized and those that I didn’t. But Jennie was right. It didn’t take me long. Abbott called her Ana, though I doubt it was her name. It must have been close enough to the right sound, for she accepted it and referred to herself that way. Ana’s voice became part of the soup in my head, and I could speak with her well enough—and understand her even better—by the time she left. She told me her Newe, her people, were called Snake by the whites, after the river that ran through their lands.
For three years she lived beneath Jennie’s wings, working and watching, until one day she was gone, and Jennie didn’t know where. Ana couldn’t write, but Jennie found a crude drawing on Ana’s cot in the cellar. It was a stick figure depiction of a woman with a pack on her back, the sun above her and pointed triangles of varying sizes in the distance. A curving line ran through them. Mountains. Tipis. A river. I knew what it meant the moment I saw it.