later in the day. Will you folks be taking in the parade and the fireworks in Santa Rosa?”
“I expect we will,” she replied. “Though Nathaniel might stay put for the cure.” Her mouth turned down at the corners and trembled. “At least Walter and I might come to town for the local color.”
“There’s not much color in Sonoma Town, but the county seat is entertaining. If you’ll excuse me.”
Jeremiah left for the changing rooms, and when he returned to poolside for another try at speaking with the little boy his hand brushed the corner of the envelope from the courthouse. He wished he could locate a Bible to find the reference to Deuteronomy and chuckled at the notion of asking the Reverend Harris to let him borrow that enormous volume he held on his lap. Mrs. Burns had pulled a chair near to her snoring husband, whose face had grown even more the color of a cooked sea crustacean.
“Walter!” the young woman called out. “Say good-bye to Mr. McKinley, the man on the farm!”
“My farm,” the boy corrected in a voice with some gravel in it, as if he’d swallowed a bit of the subterranean water he directed his boat through. His mother laughed.
Once again Jeremiah squatted on his haunches poolside. “What do you remember about your farm, about Fin Hollow Glen?” he asked.
“Everything.” Walter spoke to the boat. “I remember you, too.”
Jeremiah and the young mother exchanged smiles verging on stifled laughter.
“What about me?” the man asked.
“You wouldn’t obey when you was young,” the little boy said in that gravel voice. “Always got to do everything your own way.”
At this the mother covered her mouth and shook with laughter. “That’s the Lord’s truth,” Jeremiah said. He and Mrs. Burns exchanged mirthful glances. “Did I turn out all right, though, after a fashion?”
Walter’s boat dipped underwater and popped up. The boy’s brow furrowed. “I reckon you did, but I fear for you now, Jaybird.”
The July sun and the soft bone-warmth of Jeremiah’s bathe suddenly turned to ice down his spine. He felt the blood drain from his face, and he rocked from his squat into an Indian lotus, soaking the seat of his trousers on the concrete. A commotion emanated from the porch, and an entourage of some dozen men in bathing togs and towels, most of them smoking cigars, marched toward the pool, Madison leaning doggedly toward the procession. “Fremont,” Jeremiah heard somebody say. “Fremont.”
The pool emptied to make room for this platoon of dignitaries. Jeremiah found himself pulled by an elbow into the queue of admirers wishing to shake the great man’s hand before immersion. The Burns family had vanished: the sleeping drunk, the frail young mother, and the little boy with old Daniel’s memory all somehow disappeared into the steam rising from the geothermal waters, and Jeremiah rocked unsteadily against Madison’s shoulder. “You a little light-headed from the bath, Mac?”
“I think it’s just my old war wounds.” He doffed his hat and wiped his brow. “Might be best if I sat on this bench.” He settled next to a damp copy of the Sonoma Democrat opened to the Abner Stiles editorial.
“Make way!” Madison said, and at the front of the queue Jeremiah saw Thomas Lake Harris again.
There was no sign of Fremont. No glimpse of the man of whom Abner had written,
Pathfinder, Pioneer, Peerless Penetrater of the perilous wilderness, leader in the Great Bear War, John C Fremont mapped the Great West, from Oregon and the Rocky Mountains to our fair valley! The Pathfinder led the charge against Mexico, represented our free state in Congress, and even ran for President as the first candidate of the Party of Lincoln! We are deeply honored and fortunate to have this brave Bayard, this beacon of bold bravado, coming to our humble town on the Glorious Fourth to shed some wisdom of his years. He has taken some time from the daunting duties of Territorial Governor of Arizona to tour old haunts in California and pay old friends a visit. Look for The Pathfinder to speak at Two O’Clock before the Courthouse! Count yourself lucky! To be in the presence of one of the great stars
in the American Constellation, the bright
• EIGHT •
June 1845
jewels of light in the heavens made him feel
as though he might fall upward from the center of that circle of wagons in the endless prairie, reversing the gravity of earth such that he would lift from this prone and spread-eagled bed of grass into the fathomless sky. He often felt balanced between worlds as he lay in the dark: between childhood and adulthood, fear and joyous wonder, even earth and sky. New voices joined the coyotes now, packs of wolves following the vast herds of buffalo and antelope, another exotic beast that the emigrants were learning to hunt, sometimes even luring the graceful hoofed creatures toward them with a red bandana on a stick before squeezing off a volley of rifle fire. Jeremiah shot well and received frequent compliments for marksmanship, but as the firewood waned, the cook fires had to be fueled by the dung of buffalo. Young people such as he and even Lucinda and her siblings were sent to gather the chips, at first humiliated by the job, then finding humor in it. To see her laugh over this mean task as he made some joke was the brightest moment of a day of bright prairie wild-flowers and huge clouds white as new snow.
One day he saw a strange brush line on the grassy horizon and was amazed to encounter the canopy of hardwood trees beneath his own height. It seemed some reversal of the natural order of things to have trees growing beneath him: a deep creek draw had made its own forested world under the prairie level, and after an hour of walking parallel to it the train found a slope to descend for sustenance.
Along the creek gulch they were accosted by Indians on horseback, and the captain instructed them in making tribute: bacon, a calf, and a few head of cattle. For the next few days and nights various livestock and goods were stolen, and many among the train were furious with the savages, who were said to be Pawnee. The young husband who’d lost his wife to the buffalo stampede took to wandering off, down the gullies, over a rise in the sea of grass, and one day he disappeared, only to be found the next stripped naked of clothes, horse, and firearm. Jeremiah remembered the scalped corpse he and David had found and thought the fellow lucky to have escaped death. The captain ordered new restrictions on the movements of his emigrants and assigned each to a partner, even when doing toilet. Jeremiah was partnered with David.
A new creature popped out of the earth by the hundreds, noisy beaver-like animals that stood on their hind legs like little men and scooted back underground. Their cities of holes made passage difficult for the horses and oxen. More red-and-white cityscapes of sandstone appeared in the distances, and sometimes the riverbanks would alternate from red bedrock to sand, making wagon travel slow. Late spring they crossed the blue South Fork and followed the yellow North Platte. Occasional lightning storms and buffalo thunder rumbled in the distance, and two Pawnee standoffs occurred, with arrows and musket balls fired from a great distance, none striking a man on either side.
The sun climbed, and the pioneers drove their cattle and wagons forward in a fever of sweat and toil, and Jeremiah saw a magnificent city rising far ahead. He wondered if it were a mirage or a vision born of some kind of waking
