to take another man to bed, and fast. She knew it as she clutched his shoulders and panted into his hair.
* * *
“I’LL plant an orchard,” Mrs. Spruill said. She had brought saplings wrapped in burlap. “I hear the Willamette Valley’s grand for fruit trees.”
The men took turns riding ahead and staying back, seeing that the women and the wagons were all right. When a horse or mule stumbled, they looked to Mr. Spruill. At fifty, he was the oldest, with a long beard his children liked to play with. They wrapped the ends behind his neck while he pretended to wonder where it had gone.
“Did it take a notion to run away?” He picked at the empty air. “If you see it, will you tell it to come back?”
Fifteen-year-old Hannah just grinned, but the younger children bubbled over with laughter: fourteen-year-old Billy, eleven-year-old George, and Constance and Ella, ages eight and six. Sometimes they walked alongside the wagons, pulling at switches of grass, and everyone’s face, even Ella’s, was lined and red and hardened from the sun.
On Sunday mornings, they read the Bible, prayed, and sang hymns, sometimes joined by other groups, their harmonious voices rising on the ceaseless grassland wind. The women kept Monday as wash day. They hung the wet garments from the sides of the wagons. The clothing and bedding streamed like pennants and dried fast in the wind. Even when the wash water was muddy, the sun bleached out the white things so they were snowy again.
Thank goodness the Spruills had brought a cow, which gave enough milk for everybody. Leftover milk was placed in covered buckets, and in a day or two, the motion of the wagon churned it to clumps of butter.
“Yankee Doodle went to town, a-riding on a pony,” sang the Spruills.
Kate rode ahead with Martin, Andrew, and Zachary. The land rolled out before them in paint-box colors.
A mail carrier approached. “Letters for back East?”
A pang went through Kate. She hadn’t written any of her friends or neighbors. Olivia waved a sheaf of letters, and the carrier put them in his leather pouch.
“We’ve crossed into Nebraska,” Martin said.
A bird spun up from the bushes and flaunted long, fluted feathers: a scissor-tailed flycatcher. Kate urged her horse into a trot across the green prairie, for the joy of it.
* * *
SHE steeled herself for the sight of graves. There were all kinds of markers, from wooden crosses to finely chiseled stone. A packing case protruded from the ground, a makeshift casket that had been unearthed and rifled. The body had been tossed aside, a child’s, no longer recognizable as boy or girl, the face eaten away. The men dug a grave and reinterred it.
Kate wished she could climb into her old bed and pull the covers over herself. Virginia would be lush with June showers. Mr. Cole had gotten a great bargain—beehives, barn cats, house, and that lovely, rainy land.
Her tears flowed. If the others saw, let them think she was crying for the reburied child.
* * *
THE trail was full of death. Emigrants died from fights, lightning strikes, and accidental drowning in rough rivers. They were run over by wheels or kicked by draft animals. Whole parties strayed from the trail and expired from hunger or thirst. Kate averted her eyes from animals’ bleached skulls and ribcages.
One day they heard a bell tolling and came upon a funeral. A man was striking the bell with a hammer. Susan gave the mourners a pan of gingerbread. Olivia chided her, and Kate felt it wasn’t the gift Olivia begrudged them, but Susan’s sympathy.
“Are you all right?” Kate asked Olivia, when they were alone.
Olivia gave a little laugh. “I feel like I forgot something, like I need to go home and get it, but I don’t know what it is.”
* * *
“DON’T drink alkali water,” warned the seasoned travelers, “and don’t let your animals.”
For now, there was enough water and game—pronghorn, deer, and sage hens, which were delicious when roasted over the fire.
Sometimes wild mustang ponies thundered past. One morning, a buffalo wandered near camp, shaggy and enormous. Martin aimed his gun but missed, and it shambled away.
“The army wants them all gone,” James said, “because that’d get rid of the Indians.”
Fifteen, twenty miles a day they covered, yet they needed to move faster. From Missouri, the journey to Oregon or California took at least four months, usually five. It was already July, and winter would come early on the trail.
Kate believed they were charmed. To others came the mishaps and misfortunes—broken axles, capsized ferries, soured potatoes, and bouts of dysentery, typhoid, and measles. People often had themselves to blame for their perils, and illness could strike anywhere. Those who sickened might have done so at home. Her party enjoyed health and well-being.
They bathed in rivers, men and women separately.
“Goodness, my hair’s turning white everywhere,” Mrs. Spruill said.
“Oh, Ma, don’t say that,” Hannah said.
Olivia kept charge of the medical supplies. There were clean needles and silk thread to sew torn skin, a bottle of laudanum for pain, sassafras root for catarrh, peppermint for upset stomach. They had pooled their food and bought more, so they had plenty—hams, bacon, apples, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pickles, jam, and dried beans, peas, and pumpkin slices. The Spruill children found Kate’s last few jars of honey, packed in straw.
“Let’s save that for later,” she said. Its scent would make her homesick.
Olivia gave each child a spoonful of molasses instead. Olivia was wise, a sister to be admired. Kate could almost believe the conversation about the Edmistons hadn’t happened or she’d misunderstood. She was ashamed of her suspicions.
At night, white-throated sparrows sang in moonlit trees along the rivers, and the Milky Way arched above, magnificent and deeply silent. One night, when the others had gone to bed in the wagons, Kate stayed up, stargazing. Someone brushed her elbow. James.
“In the Greek myths,” he said, “Orion chased the Seven Sisters.”
“The hunter chased the girls?”
“Yes. They were scared, and they asked Zeus for help.”
“And what did he do?”
“He changed them into doves and put them in the sky.”
Wolves’ howls reached her ears. The eerie, discordant music gave her a reason to move closer to him. If he tried to kiss her, she’d let him.
“It’s my turn to keep watch,” he said, and was gone.
Day after day, she followed him with her eyes. He could turn her into a bird. He could turn her into anything he wanted to.
* * *
THE
