“Don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug. “Happened that same spring I rode back to St. Louie. After I come back west. At Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas River. Ain’t see’d wuth a damn from the eye ever since.”
“It’s gone cloudy,” she said, inspecting it closely. “I’ve known some folks that’s happened to.”
Hopeful, he asked her, “They ever get better of it?”
“No, Pa,” and she shook her head. “Wish I could tell you different. But I never knew of a person, their eyes got better after they got cloudy such a way. Yours no better since?”
“Can’t say it’s got worse neither,” he admitted. “Allays made do with the one.”
Leaning close, she studied his one good eye. “I didn’t remember till just now—but your eyes are green. Like mine. They’re green like mine.”
With a self-conscious swallow he realized his tongue was so dry it nearly clung to the roof of his mouth. “Talkin’ is dusty work—lemme get a drink.”
Releasing her, Scratch leaped over to his drinking bucket and pulled an iron dipper from it. A lot of it sloshed on his dusty moccasins as he brought it to his lips and slurped what he hadn’t managed to spill. Then he suddenly thought of genteel manners. “You want some?”
“Yes, I would like that,” she answered, coming over and taking the ladle from him after he had dipped her a drink. “I never knew there could be heat like this.”
“You think it’s hotter here’n it gets hot back to St. Louie?”
Wiping the back of her hand across her lips, Amanda said, “A different heat. Back there is so heavy, sticky with misery. But the farther west we’ve come, the drier it got. Like the sun’s been sucking every drop right outta me … Pa.”
He smiled at that, hearing her use that special word. “You come west with that wagon train?”
“Yes, all the way from Westport.”
“That’s a long way for a gal … for a woman on her own.”
She laughed easily at that. “I ain’t alone, Pa. I’ve had a family for some time.”
“A-a family?”
Leaning toward him, she asked, “Lookit me, real close. I ain’t the young gal you met back to St. Louie all them summers ago. Lookit these lines I see when I look in my mirror every night. Can’t stand to look in it the mornings when I rise, what for all the aging I see. It’s better to see my tired ol’ wrinkles by candlelight when the children are put to bed and I have a few minutes—”
“Children? Y-you got young’uns?”
“Land sakes, Pa! I said I come west with my family—children and a husband too.”
“You married and started your family,” he said, on the verge of wanting to believe it. “Wh-where are they?”
“Back at the wagon camp,” she confided. “After I heard your name early this morning in the store, and looked outside the door to find you pounding on that anvil—I bided my time.”
“Didn’t come right over an’ make yourself knowed to me?”
With a wag of her head, Amanda confessed, “I wanted to be alone when I came to talk. So I walked back to the camp with Roman and the children. Told him I was coming back to wrangle a deal for some calicos at the store from Major Bridger’s wife. He’d have to watch the children while I came back to the post.”
“Gabe … Jim Bridger don’t have a wife no more,” he explained. “She got took givin’ birth to their last child.”
Her eyes filled with consternation. “But … it was an Indian woman.”
“Which’un you talk with?” he asked. “Which Injun woman?”
“She was a taller one. Had a long face, not the round-faced woman—”
“You met my wife!”
“The … same one you were … with when you came back to St. Louis in thirty-four?”
“I got back to her down in Taos just afore she birthed our first child, a daughter.”
Amanda’s eyes widened. “She’s here too? Your daughter … your other daughter?”
“Magpie,” he said. “My boy—he come with Bridger to lead your train down to the south meadow to camp. You see him yesterday, spy him with Bridger?”
“Our wagon was so far back in the train,” she explained. “The dust and all—we never saw anything happened up front.”
Bubbling with enthusiasm, he said, “He’s a great boy, more’n ten years old now.”
Amanda dabbed a fingertip at a bead of sweat that was collecting in the hollow under her lower lip. “So you have two children?”
“Actual’, there’s three. ’Nother boy. Four summers old now. An’ there’s one on its way this comin’ winter.”
“Your fourth?” Then she caught herself. “I mean, that would be your fifth, counting me—of course. I was your first!”
“That’s some, for a ol’ fella like me.”
“Pa, I’ve got four of my own,” she declared, glowing with pride. “My oldest, a boy, he isn’t as old as your … Magpie.”
He took a step back and regarded her with a big grin. “Your whole family’s here? Goin’ west?”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Where away—California or Oregon?”
“Oregon.” She said it with a special reverence. “Roman’s been wanting to come west for almost three years now. They been hard years.” The softness in her eyes melted away with what he took to be a sour-tinged remembrance. “Roman, he was gonna get to Oregon, or kill himself back there in Missouri.”
“Kill hisself?”
She wagged her head dolefully. “First years of our life together, things went good for us. We lived on his daddy’s farm, worked it together, one big family. Then his pa died, took by the lung sickness, coughing up blood till he got so weak he couldn’t fight off the fever anymore. Next year Roman’s ma was taken by cholera. They kept her in to town, in an old chicken coop an’ away from folks so she wouldn’t make no others sick. It near tore Roman apart. But, everyone said it was the best for our children. We had two who could walk by then, and one just born too.”
“Losing your family ain’t good on a body’s heart,” he said. “Your mother, Marissa, how’s she now?”
“I haven’t seen her in over five years,” Amanda confessed. “Wanted to see her one last time before we started to Oregon, but by then she was married to a river man and moved east to Owensboro. On the Ohio. I pray she’s been well—there’s so much sickness back there. I hope we can keep on going to Oregon without losing any more folks.”
“You ain’t lost some of your own young’uns?”
“Mercy, no,” and she shook her head. “Others. People we came to know as the train was forming up outside of Westport. Lost friends on the way here. All along the Platte, they took sick, one after another. A child here. A mother there. A father on down the trail a few more miles. Seemed like every Sunday morning we had another person already ailing so bad for us to pray over them. By the time the week was out, we’d have us a funeral. Wasn’t till we got to Chimney Rock that we wasn’t burying folks along the way.”
“Air got drier,” he explained quietly. “Maybe some of that ague an’ tick-sicks got dried up.”
“Yes, it does seem we’re all healthier now,” she agreed. “Thank God for His blessings.”
“Yes, Amanda,” he agreed as he pulled his daughter against him again. “Thank God for all His great an’ many blessings.”
She raised herself on the toes of her dusty, cracked boots and planted a kiss on his grimy cheek. The black soot she came away with around her mouth made him laugh. Dipping the cuff of a sleeve on his shirt into the water bucket, he dabbed it around her cracked lips.
“You ought’n keep some tallow on your mouth,” he advised. “Won’t get so sore like it is.”
“I’ll be fine,” she claimed. “We’ll all be fine once we get to Oregon. Everything Roman’s read says it rains plenty there. Crops grow nearly by themselves, all the papers say.”