“It’s a good place for to raise crops, Amanda,” he confirmed. “Raise up your family too.”
“C’mon, Pa,” she prodded him, pulling on an elbow toward the edge of the brush awning. “I want you to introduce me to your wife, to all your children.”
He stopped in his tracks. “How’m I gonna meet your family?”
“I don’t think the company’s moving on for two, maybe three, more days,” she declared. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to meet them tomorrow.”
“Want to meet ’em?” he exclaimed. “Hell, I want you go fetch ’em right now and bring the hull clan back here a hour or so afore suppertime.”
“T-today?”
“So we got some time to talk afore an’ after supper both!”
That seemed to strike her speechless for a moment. “Is this an invite to supper with your family, Pa?”
“Damn right—er, ’scuse me, Amanda,” he apologized. “Bring that husband of your’n, and those four young’uns over for supper. I’ll tell Waits-by-the-Water to put another hindquarter to roast over the fire for supper—”
“Waits-by-the-Water,” she repeated. “Ever since St. Louis, I’ve punished myself for not remembering her name. All these years, I wished I could have remembered your wife’s name.”
“S’all right now,” he said. “I hope you two take to each other.”
“When I was walking back here from camp alone to see you, I kept thinking that she must surely be used to white women, since you two live here at Major Bridger’s fort where so many white folks come through all summer long. But I was afraid too that she’d look down her nose at me for being a silly young white woman.”
“I don’t think Waits-by-the-Water could look down her nose at anyone,” he stated. “She’s the kindest, most gentle an’ loving person I met in my whole blamed life, Amanda.”
“Wouldn’t want her thinking any less of me because I’m younger than her, white and all.”
“How old are you now?” he asked her, failing to recall.
“I turned thirty-two on the trail, Pa. Back in June, along the North Platte.”
His face screwed up a minute as he did his best ciphering right there in his head. “Thirty-two? Why, you ain’t much younger’n Waits is. She’s in her thirty-second summer.”
“Sh-she’s the same age as me?”
He nodded. “Can’t be more’n a few months older’n you, at the most. Why, that alone’ll give you two so much to talk about.”
“She speaks English?”
“Waits talks real good American. Magpie and Flea too. Jackrabbit, now he’s getting the hang of it as he gets older.”
She smiled. “Supper here sounds grand, Pa. If you don’t think we’ll be imposing on her, Waits-by-the-Water.”
“I don’t think there’s a chance of that, Amanda,” he explained. “Soon as I came back to Taos to fetch her north to her home country, I started telling her all about you, ’bout your mother and grandpa too. We even talked about me takin’ her back to St. Louie some time, to look you up and spend some time. But … St. Louie and all them folks, all them farms an’ houses an’ crowded towns back there—just never seemed like a good enough idea for me to do.”
Amanda nodded and reached out to take one of his gritty hands in both of hers. “So, I had to come west to find you, didn’t I?”
“That what you was intendin’ to do?”
“No, I really never thought I’d see you again, Pa,” she confessed. “Figured you’d be dead, killed by Injuns or bears or froze in the mountains by now. Never figured I’d hear your name spoken again in the balance of my days.”
“Then you heard tell of Titus Bass in the store at Fort Bridger.”
She laughed. “Even heard your name cursed at Fort Laramie. The Frenchmen there swore they’d love to cut your throat, if they ever got hands on you!”
“So you figgered I’d gone under awready?”
“Chances weren’t good for a man surviving this long out here, Pa—were they?”
“No, Amanda,” he admitted. “But, I had the spirits smiling down on me ever’ since I come west in twenty-five. Ain’t no other reason I come through all the scrapes I put behind me.”
“God’s been good seeing me through this journey so far, Pa,” she said, casting down her eyes. “Lately, we haven’t had the best life, Roman and me.”
His eyes narrowed. “He ain’t been bad to you, has he?”
She looked at him again, saying, “No, no—Roman’s been a good husband. Strong and full of love, Pa. For me and the children. God knows he isn’t the brightest man I could have married, but he had the best heart.”
“Why you say you ain’t had the best life, you two?”
Shrugging her shoulders, Amanda turned slightly from her father. “Sometimes I think there’s certain people just not meant to make a go of things in life. No matter how hard they try, no matter they throw their whole heart into something … time after time.”
“There’s some folks who wander this way and that afore they eventual’ find the way of their life,” he responded after a long moment of thought. “Your own pa was that sort, Amanda.”
“There’s been times when it was real hard on the children,” she explained, looking up at him again. “Row … my Roman—sometimes he gets dark. Those were the times I could tell the failure was eating him up inside, Pa. He’d look around at other folks who had a store and they’re making a little money for their family. Or, Roman would look around and see other folks making the ground work for them, feeding their family and putting a little money away for the lean times. But … seems like it’s always been lean times for us. Never got any better. Last few years, we been going from bad times to worse times, no matter what Roman threw himself into with all his might.”
From the look on her face and the sound of her words, he was almost afraid to ask her the question, “You still love him?”
Yet she nodded her head emphatically and smiled as she said, “Oh, yes, Pa. I love him. Enough to follow him to Oregon Territory where he wants to make a new dream happen for us. Roman’s so sure that will be the place for us. You should see the way his face shines when he talks about the new life we’ll have out there.”
“Does my heart good to see that your man wants the best for his family,” Titus replied, reassured.
“He does, Pa. I know it in my heart.”
“So you’re gonna stand by him?” he asked.
“Every step of the way,” she declared with conviction. “We’re doing this for the children, going to Oregon for our family. Make a new start we haven’t been able to do anywhere else as we moved across Missouri, from one settlement to the next … hoping each new place was going to be the one where we’d really sink down roots and build up something good.”
Holding out his arms, Bass stepped toward her. Amanda came into the shelter of her father’s arms and laid her cheek against his shoulder. He said, “Ever’thing I hear about Oregon tells me it’s the place for a farmer’s family to put down those roots and make a life for themselves.”
“We started out reading all the papers and books about Oregon we could find,” she explained. “Right from the first, Row said it got much more rain than we got back home in Missouri. Some people wrote that it didn’t take much for anything to grow out there: just scratch a hole in the ground, drop in the seed, and wait for it to sprout right up on its own!”
“Other folks what already come through this summer all said pretty much the same thing, Amanda,” he emphasized. “On their faces is writ all the much trouble they been through getting this far west, but in their eyes is still the light of where they know they’re going.”
“I never knew the journey would be this hard on us, this tough on the children,” she admitted. “Never gone through anything like this that sucks me dry of all my strength by the end of every day … laying my head down every night, knowing I gotta get back up in the morning and do it all over again.”