Titus turned at the rustle and murmur behind him, watching Hoyt Bingham come through the crowd with a green bottle in his hand. The train’s other captain knelt just inside the late-afternoon shade of the awning and held out the bottle to Roman.
“May—maybe some whiskey help it,” the man offered.
Roman nodded to Titus, and Bingham shifted his offering to Bass. For a long moment he stared at that bottle in the settler’s hand, an old hunger raising its head in the pit of him—the sort of hunger that came when there was nothing else to do but numb a pain with the forgetfulness of liquor … then he looked at Bingham’s face again and those eyes pleading that he could find some way to help. At last Scratch looked down at how Roman held his son’s tiny hand, not thinking that offer of whiskey was such a fine idea after all.
“Maybeso later,” Titus said softly. “Likely … we could sure use that whiskey … a little later. Thankee most kindly.”
Again and again Waits and Toote brought steaming rags in a brass kettle, rags he held over the soupy poultice. Changing the rag that had cooled off for a hot one as the crowd around them breathed but did not mutter a word. Maybe they were all talked out for now. Nothing more to say. No words that could make any difference. Maybe not even prayer words. So he glanced up at those vacant eyes in those dusty faces here beside the Soda Springs where the small geyser spewed at that moment with a watery gush.
He was helpless as any of them were, these emigrant farmers who had no earthly reason to be out here in his wilderness when they should be back in their hardwood forests, or on in their promised land on the Willamette River of Oregon Territory. Anywhere but here, an unnamed, unmapped hell of the country more than halfway between where they’d come from and where they still dreamed of putting down new roots. Easy was it for Titus to read that despair on their faces. It could have been any child, their child, their youngest, the baby who would have grown up strong and bold in that far-off land of promise. But here they stood suspended in time and distance, much, much too far from their old homes to ever consider turning back for what was. Still too damn far from Oregon country to truly believe any of them could make it to that promised land without being forced to pay some terrible price for their wanting and hungering for it.
Everything came with a price, Titus brooded. The wanting of that paradise on the Willamette … it had come with a hard, hard price for this little family.
Was his wanting of a little paradise far, far to the north for his family going to come with some awful price as yet hidden beyond the horizon … somewhere out there where he could not see it coming, could not turn out of its way?
So he peered up at Bingham and Ryder, Murray and Truell, Fenton and Iverson, and all those nameless ones who had stood up against the way of eastern men like Hargrove. Good, simple, hardworking men who sweated into the ground, bled on the soil to coax something green from it. Men who had already spent months and much more than a thousand miles learning what it was going to take to reach Oregon. Not just the anvil one of them had abandoned way back on the Kaw, or a sideboard already some five generations old left behind on the lower Platte. Maybe that clumsy, bulky grinding stone thrown out by the time the great shallow river split in two and they began to follow the road’s course as it northed to Laramie. Perhaps some heavy china that had belonged to a great-grandmother, now left carefully stacked and abandoned beneath a wind-stunted tree at the base of Chimney Rock. Treasures left behind for them that might appreciate what treasures they were, and what it had taken to leave them behind—forever.
All of these sojourners had left something behind … even loved ones. Blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Each loss a supreme sacrifice paid on the altar of this wilderness crossing. A stillborn child laid to its rest in a tiny hole beside the Little Blue. Then the train’s first cholera victim, who awoke one bright, clear morning with nothing more than a headache, was taken feverish by midday, and at death’s door before the train stopped for the night. That woman wasn’t the last to be taken, Amanda had told her father as tears had pooled in her eyes several nights ago at their fire, when she had attempted to explain what sacrifices these emigrants had been making all along. Seventeen more had died, gripped by the cholera that chased them right out of the settlements, she declared, chased by that scourge until they finally outran it somewhere close to Courthouse Rock on the North Platte. No more graves after that one they dug for the husband and father who had stumbled clambering out of his wagon, dropping his loaded rifle, and shot himself under the chin. He had been the last one of these Oregon-bound sojourners they had buried on the way. …
At least until this day. Why the babes and the youngest among them? He sat there in the coming twilight, asking this troubling question of that great, still being he was just beginning to trust. Why this little Lucas?
As dusk deepened about them, someone brought three lamps, and though a few left, going back to stir up fires and put supper on the boil, Titus was surprised that most of these people ended up staying on in silence. A watch, he thought. A wake they were making of the boy’s slow, fitful death, but nothing noisy in the slightest. No, these were the sort of people who were standing out there in the gathering clot of night, wondering on this happenstance, thanking their capricious God that it hadn’t been one of their happy, laughing, carefree children who had been sacrificed to this camping ground at Soda Springs. These simple folks with simple dreams and simple prayers, standing there on the edge of the fire’s glow or lamplight four or five deep, watching without a murmur, trying to grasp onto some sense of how it must feel to be Roman or Amanda Burwell right now.
Every one of these sojourners sure to sense how the journey had just taken its heaviest toll, its tithe, its blood sacrifice from this little family. Perhaps praying—they were wondering if they would make it the next thousand miles or so to the Willamette without being required to make a flesh-and-bone sacrifice of their own to this life-altering journey. Secretly in their heart of hearts offering thanks to their God that it was someone else who had paid and not them.
So Titus brooded darkly on what kind of prayer-maker it would take to thank their God for taking some other person’s child. How goddamned holy did that make them, even if they invoked the Almighty’s name and His spirit? All these simple people inching west toward the setting sun, brazenly believing they were only moving from one old home to a new home … with only a matter of some miles and months in between. Stupid, simple people, he cursed them—thinking of this march across the prairie, onto the High Plains, and over the mountains, fording powerful rivers, fighting off the cold and dust and bugs and water scrapes too … who were these people to stand out there in the dark and pray to their God, a God who hadn’t done a damned thing to help save the life of this small, happy, towheaded helpless boy who’d never done a thing to hurt anybody and was just coming to know his grandpapa? Who were these people to judge anyway?
“P-Pa?”
He turned at Amanda’s weak, raspy call, found her leaning over Lucas. “Hol’t that light up for me, Roman.”
Burwell raised the lantern, its oil sloshing in the brass well as the farmer held it above them all, creating stabs of shadow and light in a half circle. Titus bent close, hoping—perhaps praying—to feel the soft brush of breath on his cheek as he stared at Lucas’s face. A thick and greenish ooze seeped out from the corner of the boy’s crusted nostril.
Titus stifled a sob, thinking, The p’isen has riz clear to the child’s head now.