The fire and the ore, p.14
The Fire and the Ore, page 14
Jane glanced up. “Me?”
“You’ve the right temperament to become an herb-woman yourself, and I’ve already seen you at work in the canyon. You’re a sensible girl—a girl with wits. What do you say?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I would like to do it, but I don’t think I could leave my sister alone.”
“She might come with you down the hill to my house—in fair weather, anyhow. Perhaps she would be good company for the children while you and I are working.”
“I must think it over,” Jane said slowly. “I’ll have to see how she fares with this tea you’ve given me. If she gets stronger . . . perhaps.”
Tabitha smiled. “Perhaps. We’ll give it till the spring, shall we? You can make your decision then.”
“Thank you, Tabitha. Oh, thank you so much for everything.”
“Call again, Jane, whenever you have need.”
Jane left Tabitha’s home just as the sun began to set, casting a long, lingering redness over the lake. She untied her mule quickly and climbed into the dogcart, hurrying toward the canyon road and home. She was eager to give Sarah Ann her first dose of tea and a good portion of boiled greens. Surely Tabitha was right, and the cure would be simple, once effected.
It wasn’t till Jane was halfway up the hill, with Centerville falling into dusk behind her, that she realized the three gold coins were still in her pocket. Tabitha had never raised the question of pay.
Jane considered Tabitha’s offer over the weeks that followed, while the bright blaze of autumn leaves turned to dull brown and the canyon winds gusted them off across the valley. The garden yielded the last of its harvest. She gathered her seeds for next year’s planting. There was no telling yet what might come with the spring. If Sarah Ann responded to the remedy, then Jane might apprentice herself to the herb-woman after all. By the time the autumn cold had settled decisively over the foothills, Jane’s prospects seemed rosy.
Sarah Ann disliked the bitter taste of the tea, but the treatment—and a good helping of stewed greens with every supper—did seem to have some effect. The girl was still as thin as ever, but she was perkier, more energetic. Now and then, she even helped Jane in the garden, pulling up the spent vines of autumn peas, digging turnips from the soil with her bare hands.
Jane began to feel confident enough in Sarah Ann’s health that she often caught herself spinning fantasies while she worked—bright plans for a hopeful future. She might serve two or three years as Tabitha’s apprentice, then take Sarah Ann south to Salt Lake City, where she would begin a practice of her own. She would find a little house at the edge of the city—nothing extravagant, only two small bedrooms and a pretty parlor like Tabitha’s. There she and her sister would live out their days in comfort and dignity. In time, they might find William and reunite the family. Jane would be the head of the household, and neither her brother nor her sister would want for anything that she could not provide.
Jane leaned on the handle of a hoe in the crisp October sunshine, watching Elijah work the mattock at the edge of the wheat field. He labored as steadily as he ever did, with his usual indrawn silence. Jane would let him know, when the time was right, that she’d had an offer from the healer—a real opportunity, a chance to step out from under his charity. Soon she and her sister would be no burden to Elijah Shaw.
He won’t mind so much that I sold his tools if he’s certain I’ll be out of his hair for good and all.
Sarah Ann gave a sudden laugh from the midst of the turnip patch. Jane looked around, smiling, for it had been a long time since she’d heard her sister sounding so energetic. Sarah Ann had pulled a round golden turnip from the earth—a huge root, almost the size of her head. She held it up for Jane to see. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes as bright as evening stars. Jane knew, looking at her sister’s rosy delicacy among the brown dullness of October, that everything would come out right, after all.
A sudden, harsh cry jerked her around so quickly, her hoe fell into the weeds. Elijah was staggering at the edge of the field, clutching his head with both hands.
Jane ran to him, calling his name, demanding to know what the matter was. He never answered till Jane was at his side, clinging to his elbow. His eyes were screwed shut, and a string of spittle ran from his lips.
“My head!” Those words grated like steel over stone. “The pain!”
Jane was no healer yet, but still, she could tell that this was no ordinary headache. He needed help, and quickly.
“Get inside and lie down,” she told him. “I’ll ride to town and bring Tabitha.”
Elijah gave a feeble nod. He began stumbling toward the cabin, still clutching his skull with both hands. Jane hoisted her skirts and ran for the corral where the black mule waited. There would be no time to hitch him to the cart. There would scarcely be time for the bridle. She must ride bareback, as fast as she could induce the stubborn animal to run.
“Help Elijah get inside,” she called to her sister. “I’m going to Centerville—”
Sarah Ann screamed—a piercing sound, terrified. Jane whirled about to stare across the empty slope. At first, through her blurred eyes, it seemed as if Elijah had vanished. Then she noticed a low brown smudge in the grass. He had fallen flat, facedown against the earth.
Jane ran again to her stepfather’s side.
“Elijah!” She dropped to her knees beside him, shaking his shoulder, pummeling his back. “Elijah, say something! Speak to me!”
He made no answer. A strange, growling animal sound ripped from Jane’s throat, half despair and half rage. He couldn’t do this now—leave them alone. Not now! She clenched his hair in her fist, turned his head sideways so she could see his face. He had fallen so hard that he’d broken his nose. Blood poured down over a slack mouth. His eyes were open, yet they saw nothing, and when Jane released his hair and placed her palm softly on his back, he was very still.
She rocked back onto her heels, staring up at the cold sky. Dead. Elijah was dead, as suddenly as that. Her last source of money in all the world; the last protection she had, a young girl alone in the foothills with a sickly sister to tend.
I’ll have to bury him at the edge of the garden, she thought, so calm and dull inside that for a moment she wondered if she had died along with him. I can’t drag him farther than that, and Sarah Ann is still too weak to help with the work.
She could hear her sister sobbing in the turnip patch. Slowly, Jane rose to her feet. She stood over Elijah’s body, looking down at the motionless blur, the great, heavy weight of him.
I must go and get the shovel, she told herself sensibly.
There was work to be done—now as ever. Jane would do her duty. When had she not? Duty and work, first and last. Duty and work, for her sister’s sake. She was all Sarah Ann had left now in this world.
9
TAMAR
The Mormon Trail
Autumn 1856
There were trees in the foothills—bristlecones and low, stunted oaks—but no time to fell them, no time for splitting lumber. Without a coffin, the family had no choice but to wrap Papa’s body in one of their thin quilts, laying him to rest in a hastily dug grave not far from the circle of the camp. And then they moved on—always onward, the trampled ring of the former campsite fading and vanishing in the grass, the simple cross Tamar had made from fallen branches dwindling to a dark slash behind her, then a speck, then nothing at all when she looked back over her shoulder.
The whole family walked in a blunt, heavy silence for days after his death. Tamar was unaware of anything, save for the grief that dragged like chains behind her. She performed the dull routine of the trail as mindlessly as a fragment of wood caught and carried by a river’s flow. Rising from her mean bed, striking the camp, taking up the crossbar of her cart to plod along the same bare, hard-worn trail. The slow rhythm of her feet, the relentless ache of her body. Yet the agony of her heart eclipsed every other pain.
It was the cold that finally brought her to the surface of her misery. One gray afternoon, the notion that her hands had grown stiff and clumsy slipped in past her ruminations. She blinked and looked at them where they gripped the crossbar. Her knuckles were red, and when she tried to open her hands to flex and stretch them, she found that her fingers moved with a peculiar slowness.
I’m cold, Tamar realized. Not only my hands but all of me.
She lifted her gaze and found that she was in the mountains proper. Forests of low-growing pines clung to the hills, which had drawn in close to the trail. Beyond, scarps of pale stone jutted from the dense green of wind-sculpted trees. The ground had sloped up gently enough that she hadn’t truly noticed the change in elevation—nor the strain of pulling uphill—but she could feel it now, a redoubled burning in her legs and back. Her breath rose in clouds. Her ears ached from the chill.
One of Martin’s boys was trotting down the length of the column, shouting out the time. “Four hours yet to go,” he said from the back of his pony. His breath, too, was a silver plume, and twin puffs of steam drifted from the pony’s muzzle.
“Where are we?” Tamar called to the boy.
“In the Laramie Range, Sister. There’s one last river crossing ahead. Then we’ll have our camp for the evening.”
“A river crossing?” Patience demanded. “Surely not, in this cold.”
“We aren’t likely to see many days warmer than this,” the boy said. “Summer’s behind us, but we’ve only twenty more days to travel. Then we’ll be in the valley.”
The boy trotted away.
“We can endure twenty more days,” Mama said, pacing along beside the handcart. But her voice was as dull as Tamar felt inside. Papa had been the most enthusiastic of them all, the most determined to reach the valley. Without his eagerness, twenty days would pass like an eternity. It seemed so absurd a length of time that Tamar laughed under her breath. Twenty days or twenty thousand. It’s all one to me, now that he is gone.
Long before they came within sight of the North Platte River, the first snow of the season arrived. It came first as a dusting of tiny crystals, almost too small to be noticed, yet the flakes stung Tamar’s face when the wind blew between the high reaches of the Laramie Mountains.
It will pass, she told herself. She leaned into the crossbar, dragging the twin weights of grief and necessity up the slope of the trail, but as the company snaked to the summit of a ridge, the snow condensed into large white flakes, whipping around Tamar with dizzying speed. She tried to fix her gaze on the foremost ranks of the company, but the snow had drawn a veil across the world. She could see no more than five cart lengths ahead.
Martin’s boys called through the blowing storm, voices muffled by the weather. “Halt! Halt and take shelter under your carts! We’ll wait out the storm in place!”
Patience helped Tamar lower the crossbar to the ground. Her hands were as stiff as ever, her fingers clumsy and locked around the damp wood.
“This may be the first sensible decision Martin has made for weeks,” Patience said. “He can’t think to ford the river in this cold.”
Tamar and Patience retrieved their blankets and woolen shawls from the bed of the cart, then crouched and scuttled under the tilted bed with Mama between them, each wrapped in a snow-crusted quilt. John and Zilpah huddled below their own cart, with Alpha thickly swaddled in his mother’s arms.
“I don’t know what you think we ought to do about the river,” Tamar said, “other than cross it.”
Patience snorted. “We ought to go back—that’s what.”
“All the way to Iowa City?”
“Of course not. We must return to Winter Quarters.”
“After how far we’ve come? And what about this snow?”
“We’re at a high elevation now,” Patience said, “but if we return to the plains, we may have weeks yet before we see another snowfall. Surely that will give us time to find reasonable shelter—or to build cabins, if we can’t reach Winter Quarters before the snows overtake us.”
“Pass the winter in cabins,” Tamar sputtered. “And what food shall we eat? Would you have us starve?”
“We shall either starve or freeze,” Patience said bluntly. “Make your choice. At least, in cabins, the men might hunt—”
“We can’t go back.” Tamar couldn’t look at her sister. She kept her attention fixed on the storm, the flakes pouring down in cascades, the snow gathering around the edges of their cart—one inch, then two. “We shall go to Zion, and we shall do it together, for our father’s sake. You know my feelings. I won’t suffer him to be called a fool.”
Mama flung a hand from her blanket, holding it like a wall between Patience and Tamar. “Stop this arguing, for mercy’s sake! All we have now is each other.”
Little by little, the storm slackened. Then the snow ceased altogether. The order to proceed was passed down the length of the company, and the pioneers emerged from the scant shelter of their handcarts—sluggish with cold, groaning and coughing in the bitter air. The need for shelter had delayed them by almost an hour, and the going was slower than usual with several inches of snow on the trail. By the time they passed the summit of the ridge and descended to the bank of the North Platte, evening had almost come.
The fording of the river was a long and harrowing chore. Once the supply wagons were hauled out on the opposite bank, Martin ordered some of the mules unhitched, and by this method, the frailest travelers were carried over the river. Mama, Zilpah, and the baby were among them, but Patience and Tamar were obliged to haul the family’s cart across the North Platte.
“I shall pull,” Patience said, “while you push from behind.”
Tamar nodded, bracing her arms against the rear of the cart while Patience splashed into the water. She could hear her sister gasp—then Patience uttered a shriek of distress. But she never slowed. The cart surged forward, and Tamar pushed with all her strength, gritting her teeth to keep from crying out as the water soaked through her boots and dragged at her skirt, slashing her legs with a knifelike cold.
She scrabbled for purchase on the slick stones. She could hear Patience sputtering and sobbing—then a gulp and a cough as the water came up to her chest and splashed into her mouth.
“Push!” Patience cried.
Tamar dug in with numb feet, praying for a surge of strength as the freezing water wrapped around her waist. She gave the cart one hard shove. It rocked forward more than she’d intended, and the wood of the bed suddenly vanished below her unfeeling hands. The cart rolled up quickly from the center of the river, but Tamar had already lost her balance. Her arms pinwheeled, beating at the surface of the water for purchase. She toppled forward into the icy current.
Searing cold closed overhead. She heard nothing but a strange, distant gurling and the pop of stone striking stone. Her body thrashed by instinct, fighting the weight of her wet skirt as it dragged her down to the rocky bed. She twisted below the surface, saw a mobile gray light hanging somewhere above, and clawed toward it. The next moment, she burst from the water, roaring desperately for breath even as the current sucked her under once more.
“Save her!” Mama’s desperate scream mingled with the churn of the river. “My daughter—save her! She’ll be drowned!”
Tamar fell back into the water, fighting, thrashing, but her limbs were growing more useless by the second. And that inexorable cold was all around her now, in her, biting down to her bones, filling her marrow with an inverse fire. She must give in; there was no sense in struggling, no use trying to survive. God demanded His sacrifice, and Tamar, like a fool, had placed herself on the altar.
Something seized her by the back of her dress—a hard hand so powerful she thought for a moment it was the Lord Himself dragging her up to Heaven. But she broke the surface, sucked in a desperate breath, and found more hands gripping her wrists and ankles. She had been caught up by four of Martin’s men. They kept her head above the water, hauling her to the opposite bank.
They left her lying on the bank and plunged back into the water. Evidently, Tamar wasn’t the only one who’d fallen. The moment the men were gone, her family crowded around.
Mama wept as she bent over Tamar. “Thanks be to God, she’s alive.”
“She won’t remain so for long if we don’t get her out of these wet clothes,” Patience said—still dripping herself.
“Pull her to her feet, John,” Zilpah said, “and help her walk. Captain Martin is setting up camp only a few yards away, beyond that stand of pines. We must get our tent up quickly. We can warm her in there.”
John pulled Tamar’s arm around his neck. She leaned on him heavily as they crept away from the noise and terror of the crossing. A half-seen sunset was fading between the trees, and the air grew colder by the moment. By the time the Loaders had rounded the pines and found the evening’s campsite, their clothing had begun to freeze on their bodies. Tamar’s skirt was stiff and white with frost. When John let go of her wrist and ducked from beneath her arm, her sleeve made a sound like shattering glass.
The family managed to raise their tent with astonishing speed. While John returned to the river for the other cart, Tamar and Patience were pulled into the tent and stripped of their frozen garments. Mama and Zilpah had both remained dry on the back of a mule. After a brief and urgent consultation with one another, they agreed to remove their underskirts and aprons, wrapping them around Patience and Tamar, who stood blue and shivering in the center of the tent. Finally, Zilpah pushed their half-clothed bodies together and wrapped them in two blankets.
“That’s the best we can do for the moment.” She eased her sisters to the ground. “Once John returns and finds something dry for himself to wear, I’ll have him light the buffalo chips I’ve kept from the prairie. We can burn the chips in my little tin trail oven. It might do to warm us for the night. And, of course, we shall all sleep under common blankets.”
Patience managed to speak through her chattering teeth. “But your husband—”
“We’ve more pressing concerns than modesty, just now,” Zilpah said.
