“I’ll tell my husband. Thank you, Mr. Lowry.”
“Will you be crossing on Decker’s Ferry as well, Mr. Lowry?” Naomi chimes in.
“I’ll swim my mules across here. But I’ll be at Whitehead’s Trading Post on the other side tomorrow to assist Mr. Abbott where I can.” I still do not look at her, and I take a few steps back, not wanting to tarry any longer. I am unsettled, and she is unsettling.
“Then we will see you there, Mr. Lowry,” Mrs. May says, inclining her head, and I tip my hat in return. They all watch me go.
Jennie is dozing in front of the broad window, the rays of the setting sun softened by the fluttering white curtains she keeps drawn across the wide panes. Her Bible is in her lap, open, and her palms rest on the pages as if she is not napping but receiving revelation, communing with the written word. The bright light blurs the fine lines on her skin, and for a moment she looks younger than her forty-five years. My father is fifteen years older than she is, but it’s easy to forget the age difference when I’ve never known them independent of one another. She hears me, and her eyes snap open. Closing her Bible, she rises and sets it aside.
“John Lowry,” she says, greeting me.
“Jennie.” I’ve removed my hat as I’ve been taught, and her eyes move to my uncovered head.
“Your hair needs trimming,” she says, as though she’s just noticing and didn’t send my father after me. “I’ll get my shears.”
“I’m leaving tonight,” I blurt, a warning that I’ll not linger long.
“What?”
“I’m going to swim the animals across tonight. I’ll make camp on the other side. If I swim them across in the morning, I’ll waste daylight getting dry.” I have not planned any of this, but the words spill out smoothly, as though I have thought it all through.
“You’re leaving tonight? But your sisters will want to say goodbye.”
“I’ll be gone for four weeks—five at the most. I don’t need to say goodbye.” The last thing I want is a big send-off.
She leads the way through her immaculate kitchen to the back porch that overlooks the pasture behind my father’s stables. The mares are grazing with their little ones. We’ve had ten foals born in the last few weeks, ten Lowry mules that will be ready to sell next spring. But it is the mares I stop to admire. Some muleteers make the mistake of breeding their best jack donkeys with inferior horses. My father says, “It’s all in the mare. The best mules come from superior mothers. The jack’s important, but the mare is everything.”
So far he’s been right.
I sit down on the stool we always use. It sets me low so Jennie can reach, and my knees jut up awkwardly at my sides. I feel like a child every time I relent to a cropping, but it is our ritual. Jennie is not affectionate or warm. When she cuts my hair, it is the only time she touches me. When I was thirteen, I ran away from St. Joe, all the way back to my mother’s village. It took me three days to get there on horseback, but the village was gone, and I returned to my father’s house after a week, filthy and bereft, expecting a switch and a severe scolding. Instead, Jennie sat me down and cut my hair. She didn’t ask me where I’d been or why I’d come back. Her gentle hands made me weep, and I cried as she snipped. She cried too. When she was finished, she made me wash until my skin was raw. Then she fed me and sent me to bed. My father told me, in no uncertain terms, that the next time I left without word, I would not be welcomed back. You wanna go? Go. But be man enough to tell us you’re leaving.
“You have a fine head of hair, John Lowry.” It is what she always says, yet she always wants to cut it off. She begins her work, snipping and clipping, until she sets down her shears, brushes off her apron, and lifts the cloth from my shoulders, shaking it out briskly into the yard.
“Is my father unwell?” I ask suddenly. I can see I have startled her, and her surprise reassures me. Little gets past Jennie.
“You live here, John Lowry. You work with him every day. You know he is not.”
She brushes the clippings from my neck.
“He is not himself today,” I grunt.
“He suffers when you go,” she says softly.
“That’s not true.”
“It is. It is the suffering of love. Every parent feels it. It is the suffering of being unable to shield or save. It is not love if it doesn’t hurt.”
I know she’s right. She knows she’s right too, and we fall silent again. I put my hat back on my head, covering Jennie’s handiwork, and I stand, towering over her. I realize, like a boy who has hit a growth spurt overnight, that Jennie is very small. I have never thought of her that way, and I stare down at her plain little face like I am seeing it for the first time. I want to embrace her, but I don’t. She reaches out and clasps my hand instead.
“Goodbye, John Lowry.”
“Goodbye, Jennie.”
She follows me through the house and out onto the front porch, watching as I descend the steps and move out into the street.
“John?” she calls, and the plaintive sound of my first name, alone without the Lowry tacked on, makes me stop.
I turn.
“It’s worth it, you know.”
“What is, Jennie?”
“The pain. It’s worth it. The more you love, the more it hurts. But it’s worth it. It’s the only thing that is.”
2
THE CROSSING
NAOMI
After supper, Wyatt, Will, Webb, and I leave the sprawling encampment of waiting wagons and impatient travelers and climb a bluff overlooking the city and the banks of the churning river. The water of the Missouri swirls like Webb’s hair when he wakes, bending in all directions. I asked the man at the tack shop—the man named Lowry who has a reputation for selling the best mules—why they call it the Big Muddy.
“The bottom of the lake is sand, and it’s always shifting and resettling, creating new channels and swales beneath the surface. It bubbles and churns, kicking up the mud. If you fall in, you’ll have a hard time coming out.”
This place is not what I expected. We came from Springfield, Illinois, and Illinois didn’t seem like it would be all that different from Missouri, but there is no quiet in St. Joseph. No stillness. No space. Music spills from the gambling houses, and men seem to be drunk at all hours of the day. Crowds gather everywhere—the outfitters, the landing areas, the auctions. There’s even a crowd outside the post office, where people push and shove, wanting to get their letters sent before they head out into the unknown. When I closed my eyes and thought of the journey west, I always pictured distance, endlessness. Wide open spaces. I guess that will come, but not in St. Joe.
Everywhere I look there are wagons and animals and people—all kinds of people. Some dirty and some dandified, and in every manner of dress and dishabille. White men and dark men and minstrel girls and preacher’s wives, thumping their Bibles from wagon beds. Some folks are selling and some are buying, but they all seem to want the same thing. Money . . . or a way to make it. Yesterday, outside of Lowry’s Outfitters, a group of Indians—there had to be more than two hundred of them—walked right down the center of the street, their feathers and colors on full display, and the crowds parted for them like the waters of the Red Sea. They hurried down the banks to board the ferries, along with everyone else, but no one made them wait in line. I learned later they were Potawatomi, and I stared until Wyatt grabbed my arm and hurried me onward.