• FOUR •
April 1845
pigtails suddenly appeared among the branches,
and a girl in a gingham dress hanging wash turned to see their wagon and smiled as they passed. They were a bedraggled lot, as Father had tried to get by without the outfitting of the average emigrant, scrimping and making do at every turn, and Jeremiah had been choking and wheezing for air in the cramped wagon beside his sister Ruth. From the opening in the Osnaburg covers coated with stinking gutta-percha against the rain he’d peered at the sunlit tree and felt his heart leap when the girl turned and smiled. He smiled back but shyly averted his gaze a second later.
They made camp among a hundred wagons in a muddy clearing called Big Soldier Rendezvous. There were many hundreds more head of cattle than men, and the sound of mooing and shouting and wood-chopping was everywhere. Jeremiah and Ruth, two years his senior, had been trying to fathom the dynamics between their parents since the old man had returned unannounced after a decade’s absence, and particularly during these three days as Mother and Father had sat in utter silence on the bench behind the team of oxen. “Perhaps God is giving them another chance,” Jeremiah whispered to her in the creaking wagon hold.
“Or perhaps they’re just a couple of cuckoos,” she whispered back.
There was talk of this being the last place to find firewood, yet there were so many fires going as to conjure the children of Israel making burnt offering to God before setting out for the unknown. Men stood on barrels and buckets and shouted to gathered clumps of men and women, and Jeremiah recognized a kind of rudimentary governance taking shape, arguments and voting and elections of wagon captains, oratorical listings of rules and punishments, advice about water and provenance. He listened as he wandered from clump to clump, looking for the girl with the pigtails. There were rhetorical flourishes calling upon the greatness of our founding leaders in their creation of a true democracy; there were biblical allusions to the push westward to a promised land ordained by the highest; and there were commonsense speeches by the drovers and cattlemen about taking care of the hooves of ox teams. At times it seemed to Jeremiah that it was less a wagon train than a cattle drive as he listened to the bovine moans and heard the boys on horses yell their commands to the horned beasts that surrounded their camp.
He had seen this many people only once before, in Saint Joseph before the jump, but here the crowd expressed a different sort of excitement than when engaged in the commerce of a municipality. They were off to new lives, every one of them, by God! And for Jeremiah the hopefulness and delight of this new beginning seemed to come less out of the crucible of these many fires than from the momentary glimpse of a girl with pigtails waving beneath a willow tree.
After the many speeches and the dinners and cleanup, as the night deepened and the stars flew among the bare branches with the fire sparks, a mournful melody floated among the pot-clanks and laughter, a rough-edged fiddle-sawing. Slow and sad, at first sour and grating as a toad call, soon it became sweet as it blended with a girl’s voice:
“Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind She’s always controlled, she’s always confined Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”
Jeremiah found the source: the girl with pigtails, singing with eyes closed beside the fiddler, who looked to be her father. Her voice was so haunting and beautiful that Jeremiah had to sit in the dirt and close his eyes to take in the rest:
“Oh, I’m just a poor girl, my fortune is sad, I’ve always been courted by the Wagoner’s lad He’s courted me daily, by night and by day, And now he is loading and going away.”
Directly the fiddle turned bright and quick and was echoed by the sound of hands clapping in unison and voices shouting. Jeremiah opened his eyes and saw a good many people dancing by firelight, ladies in their long work dresses and tight bonnets being turned about by bearded men in suspenders and baggy breeches, dogs barking excitedly, a few men lifting a jug and passing it down the line. Among the dancers was one clean-shaven fellow in a waistcoat and fancy collar who seemed to give the ladies the most wondrous turns as he moved up and down the line. He had high boots and tight pants, round cheeks and full lips, and blond curls that bounced across his forehead as he twirled the girls and ladies. Jeremiah looked upon him in awe, and his sister Ruth exclaimed that she’d never seen such a gentleman.
The word became flesh for the first time in his life: gentleman. Jeremiah had possibly never seen one until now, such a robust, well-turned, powerful, elegant, handsome figure of a man. He had a broad, intelligent face and an erect bearing. He moved with the grace of a stallion among clumsy oxen, taking the women in his arms one by one until, with the onset of a slow waltz tune, he bowed deeply and took the hand of the girl with the pigtails.
In a moment Jeremiah felt the hope of the new world come to an end. The girl smiled up at the beau and joined him in dance. The boy’s sinuses swelled and his lungs rattled. He turned away and bent double with coughing, making to slink back to the wagon and fall in a defeated heap, but a hand smacked him smartly across the back, nearly knocking him to his face in mud, while another kept him from striking the earth by gripping his back collar. “You all right?”
Ruth had been raised chopping wood and swinging a mattock into pine-root-infested soil, and her back-slap came with authority. She laid into him several times, but he was unable to yelp for her to stop. A good number of people laughed at her performance of filial affection, and one young wit remarked, “If that boy ain’t dyin’ already, she’ll make sure he gits to heaven fast,” which made Ruth stop.
“He’s got the agues,” she said in her defense.
Jeremiah felt the fellow’s strong hands help him to a seat on a wooden toolbox. The man had a new wisp of beard and a dirty shirt made of sacking. “You all right, boy?” Jeremiah nodded. “You think yer sister kin dance as well she kin beat people half to death?” He heard Ruth huff indignantly behind him as several people laughed. “You think if I ast her to waltz she’d toss me around the ring like I was a sack of flour?”
Jeremiah took an immediate liking to the fellow. “Mayhap,” he rasped.
Ruth was the one Mother called sassy, her obstinate mule-girl. Mary and Grace had found husbands and farms of their own, but Ruth had never seemed marriageable in Mother’s or Jeremiah’s eyes until that night’s waltz with the big-shouldered, wispy-bearded fellow. He watched them turn about stiffly by the firelight among the many couples, and he watched the willow girl spin in perfect grace with the handsome gentleman, and the beauty of their dancing warmed his bruised heart. The agony of being sickly and unfit, of being merely fourteen and pimply and small for his age into the bargain, was alleviated by this moment of pure observation. How lovely they looked in the firelight!
THE NEXT MORNING he sat cleaning the family flintlock, a Kentucky long rifle that had been his maternal grandfather’s, when David, the wispy-bearded fellow, asked him to join in a deer hunt before the wagons got ready to roll. He spoke to the boy, but his eyes searched the wagon.
“She’s gathering wood,” Jeremiah told him. David’s cheeks flushed.
They were joined by three other young men, including the handsome gentleman, and Jeremiah felt deep gratitude for being included, even though he knew his invitation was a product of merely having been present when David had come sparking for Ruth. The other three complained of headaches from drinking
