and today and for ever.
The morning was rapidly gaining heat, the dust rising as he mounted the mare again. He anticipated the professor’s mocking assessment of this life Jeremiah had saddled himself with: starting a new family in this backwater frontier town so late in life, teaching local urchins how to read and cipher, writing occasional reports for a local newspaper while secretly writing his epic poem, and taking over his father’s farm after the old man’s passing. And he wondered if the old cynic had ever truly felt the pull of such a woman’s love, the heart’s compass drawing him always back to her
whose freckled cheeks and sky—
• SIX •
May 1845
blue eyes might appear above the breast-high grass
all of a sudden like some gleaming bluebird’s wings as he made his way through the green sea, parting the fibrous waves with his arms like a swimmer, and his heart would pound in his chest. There were entire days of walking silently in that high grass and watching for glimpses of the girl in pigtails, called Cindy by her pretty mother and little siblings, called Lucy by her pale father; there were hours of struggling to breathe and joining Mother on the buckboard to recover; there was the handsome gentleman named Will, his love rival and obvious superior and even, in many ways, his idol, riding his chestnut stallion beside the captain, who called orders from his black mount and urged haste as the water bags shrunk; and there was the huge sky the color of the girl’s eyes, with glistering clouds moving overhead like great white covered wagons themselves.
This was Kansas. There were no more night dances or songs or fires beyond the meager cook sites. There were no more Indian encounters, but cattle kept disappearing, and the emigrants blamed the loss on the Kaw, and some of them thanked the Lord it was just steers and not people getting spirited away in the night by the red man. The family cow took on a desperate expression, her long eyelashes fluttering in panic as Father offered her the daily bowl of water, and later Jeremiah wondered if the poor creature had received some premonition of her imminent death. The poor, lovely, gentle cow that Mother had milked and sung German songs to for some five years, and whose milk was churned to butter in a bucket by the simple rocking of the emigrant wagon, hadn’t a chance. It was hitched to the fate of a cursed man.
The boy was beginning to see how much like Job the old man truly was: misfortune sought him in particular among the tribe of men. His oxen split their hooves and needed tar, which required more firewood; his wagon wheels wobbled and split their spokes, even though he’d been trained as a wheelwright and fashioned them himself; his only surviving son wheezed like death each evening while his daughter sassed his requests and did as she pleased. And when the first Kansas storm hit, it seemed God had seized a special opportunity to punish Daniel McKinley.
One moment there was the bright sun on endless fields of grass and wildflowers, and rich birdsong, especially that of a large new bird that darted through the meadow, a swift hunter called the lark; then, of a sudden, silence, and darkness was on the face of the Kansas plain as on the first morning of creation. Minutes later wind and rain lashed them, and seconds after its onset men and beasts were attacked by a fusillade of hailstones, many the size of a child’s fist. There was a hubbub of yelling and grasping at the wagon roofs, which were trying to take flight like great flapping birds themselves. There was a flash of light, which gave the entire table of land and the frantic emigrants a ghostly aspect, and a sudden clap, which seemed to come from inside the boy’s head.
In Missouri he had known to stay away from the tallest trees during thunderstorms, but in Kansas there was nothing taller than a Conestoga wagon to attract lightning. The bolts spread like spider-webs in the air and now and then boomed in the boiling sky with such force as to shake the soul out of a man. The hairs of his body rose and tingled, and he swore that a blue aura passed along the metal wagon rims and rifle barrels on the buckboard, sizzling like bacon in a pan, though no others could verify this impression.
The boy watched as one thick, crooked finger of light reached down from the black heavens and turned their brown-and-white cow into a lantern. Her wide eyes and horns burst from her steaming skull, her body glowed red-orange, and there was a sudden smell of burned and roasted flesh.
Then the storm passed as quickly as it had come. Old Daniel stood above the twisted corpse of the milk cow and gazed heavenward. “McKinley,” the stinking, homely man in badger fur named Smith asked, “why you suppose it struck only your cow and nothing else?”
The old man made no reply.
THE ICE BALLS were gathered like gold nuggets into pots and pans and saved as drinking water. The cow was roasted on the spot, and by the time her life became sustenance for man the green sea had lifted its battered leaves and was steaming heavenward with the smoke from Daniel’s fire. The old man handed the leather tome to his son and requested an appropriate reading before those gathered about the spit. Jeremiah hadn’t realized that his father even knew of his ability to do so.
“And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor,” the boy read from Genesis, “the Lord said in His heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” He could hear murmurs of appreciation among those sharing the meat. He hoped the girl with pigtails might be hidden somewhere behind the grown-ups, and his cheeks burned as he continued, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.’”
COMING TO THE PLATTE was less like coming to a river in the boy’s mind than arriving at a place where a part of the sky had fallen to earth. It was so wide and shallow that men and beasts walked its surface like an immense blue highway. After the privations of Kansas this highway of life was the sweetest blessing imaginable, and he knelt and drank like any beast of the field and praised the Lord of that Bible from which various emigrants now made requests of his reading by campfire.
At the first river camp the women set about washing and stringing clothes between wagons, and Jeremiah made himself present as the pigtail girl was stretching on her toes to hang her father’s long johns. “Can I help?” he asked, rushing toward her.
“Well, sure. You look tall enough.” It was true. Since Missouri his pants had crept from ankle to calf. He took the wet garment from her hands and strung it across the line. “What’s your name, and what school did you attend back home? You read beautifully.”
His face burned. “I’m Jeremiah.” He concentrated on the wet union suit as it were an object of grave importance. When he looked at her face from the deliriously close proximity of her passing along the next garment for the laundry line, their fingers touching in the process, his tongue seized within his throat.
“I just turned fifteen,” she said, “and Father wants to marry me off quicker than tomorrow, and I just don’t know, it’s all so confusing right now.” He remained nearly silent, nodding or grunting as she chattered until the task was finished, and he took his leave on heavy feet, thinking, Fool, fool, fool! For he had heard enough to know that she was a young woman with a formal education and breeding, a beautiful maiden promised to a handsome gentleman from the South, and he was a boy a year her junior, raised on a backwoods farm, far from schools and cities and culture.
THAT NIGHT the captain had them form a circle with their wagons on a large island right in the middle of the knee-deep river. The fires crackled and died in its center, and the Platte gurgled
