Roman gazed down at his wife, then nodded and turned without a word. The children started back with him, joined by Waits and Toote.
Scratch moved up and laid his arm across his daughter’s shoulder. “Sure you wanna watch us finish this?”
She nodded once. And Sweete reached out to grab the handle.
“I can do this,” Titus said.
“Let me,” Shad offered quietly, his big sad eyes imploring. “You stay with your daughter.”
They watched the big man scrape and scrape and scrape the soil back in on that tiny box at the bottom of such a deep hole, deep enough, Titus thought, that no wolf would do anything but give up, even if it was able to smell something on this tiny patch of ground. When he had the hole completely filled in, Shad began stamping around on the new soil, compressing it, before he tossed on some more of the dirt and compressed again with his big feet.
“I’ll carry the rest away from here,” Sweete explained as he took the first shovelful of the excess dirt and started toward a copse of trees fifteen yards away.
“Gonna stay behind awhile, Amanda,” he said softly to her while Shad was coming and going. “Build me a fire over the spot. Make sure no critter can smell a thing and try digging it up. Too far down, made sure of that. But I don’t even wanna think ’bout some wolf tryin’—”
He saw she was crying again.
“I can’t go, Pa.”
“Can’t go?”
She wagged her head. “I gotta stay here. Not ready to go on. Not … just yet.”
“Awright, Amanda. You want to, you can stay here with me. You can take your time for grievin’, all you need.”
Minutes later as Roman pulled the four-hitch team of oxen around in a circle nearby and halted, Titus announced to Burwell, “Come see her afore you go, son.” Then he explained that she would be staying there with him to see to the grave.
“You gonna be all right, Amanda?” Roman asked, lines of concern deep in his brow. “You … you’ll be coming, right?”
“Yes, Roman. I’ll come along soon. I just need a little more time here,” she confessed. “Not ready to let him go just yet.”
The big farmer embraced her a long while, then kissed the top of her head and wiped the tears off her cheeks before he clambered back up the front wheel, squeaked onto the seat, and slapped the reins down on the backs of those oxen. Lemuel came up beside the lead ox and snapped it with a long whip, hollering at the animal to giddap as he turned to look back at his mother in farewell, wet streaks running down the young man’s cheeks.
When the wagon came around, the two girls were at the rear gate, there above the swinging buckets, waving back at their mother from the rear pucker hole, sobbing once more.
Toote and Waits stood with the children, those two shaggy dogs, and the extra stock until the wagon caught up; then they all fell in on the road to Oregon, the last in line for the day’s march. Shad swung into the saddle and waved his long .62 flintlock in the air before he wheeled around and heeled into the march, eventually disappearing with the rest.
“You wanna sit over there in the shade, Amanda?”
Scratch walked with her over to that copse of trees near some large boulders. “Stay here in the shade an’ don’t you go too near them rocks where the sn—”
He bit off the word too late.
So she looked up at him as she settled to the ground in the shade of that sunny new day. “Gonna always look out for snakes, here on out, Pa.”
“You sit yourself, daughter, and you do your grieving. It’s what a body’s s’posed to do when a big chunk been tored outta their heart.”
After a minute, while she sat staring at that patch of disturbed ground several yards away, he knelt before her and said, “I’m goin’ off now—fetch some firewood from what’s been left round the camp. Build me a fire on the grave.”
He stood up in that silence, her sigh the only sound, along with the slight tremble among the leaves brought by a first breeze stirring through the branches overhead.
A good place for a body to rest in peace, he thought as he started away to scratch up a heap of firewood. This silence made for a mighty fine place for a mortal body to rest for all time to come.
It had taken the better part of the morning to drag in what wood was left behind by the others, logs and limbs scattered across the camping ground. Then he built his fire, fed it with new timbers, and let it burn down to embers before he began working at the fire’s edges to turn the hot ashes and glowing embers over, mixing them with the dry, flaky soil, one shovelful at a time.
Hot work, what with the way the sun had come up mean and resentful in that cloudless sky, baking him from overhead while the rising heat from those embers scorched him from below. Both moccasins were permanently blackened now, along with the bottoms of his buckskin leggings and that fringe that trailed at his heels too. But fire was a good thing. Flames had a way of cleansing what they touched. Just the way he had rubbed that powder into Lucas’s snakebites and set them afire, now this ground had been cleansed of the smell of man, the stench of death.
A harsh purging for this unmarked grave, cleansed with the ancient, renewing power of fire. Just like a lightning storm started a whisper of smoke, burnt down a whole mountainside of timber, then from the fallow and black ground rose new life the following spring.
As he slowed his digging, straightened, and wiped the huge drops of sweat from his face with a sleeve, for the first time since the others had gone Titus began to sense the unalterable numbness of that hole eaten away inside him again, a hole he had filled with all the nonstop work of digging and hammering and filling and burning. But now the fire was out and the embers lay scattered, turned over and over and over with the soil that had grown as hot as the sun’s own scorchy breath. He stood there, leaning on the handle of that shovel, helpless to stop its pain from rising within him like the black, bubbling tar in those pits over on the Wind River, north from the mouth of the Popo Agie. Hot, thick, rising bubbles of pain that threatened to gag him with the bitter taste of clabbered gall.
Below him lay a child fresh and dewy at life, innocent of pain and evil, ignorant of betrayal … a child Titus was just coming to know. A grandson with a soul so beautiful—remembering how the boy held out his hand to shake with a grizzled stranger who wore beaded earbobs, or looked his grandfather squarely in the eye to ask a why to almost everything, or bounded upon the old man’s knee for a story of grizzly bears and Indian warriors and rendezvous glories too … it nearly chewed away a hole inside the old man there beside the child’s unmarked grave. A gaping void he didn’t know how he’d fill … or where … or with who.
Amanda had her head buried in her forearms looped across her knees, where they were tucked against her breast as he returned to the shade. She looked up as he approached.
“Oh … Pa,” she whimpered, her eyes still full as he dropped the shovel and collapsed in exhaustion beside her. “How am I ever going to remember where Lucas is buried?”
Enfolding her in his arms, he cradled her and said, “You will. You’ll remember the Soda Springs, and remember how we done ever’thing we could to keep him safe.”
Shaking her head, Amanda pushed back from him. “I shouldn’t have let them bury him. Roman and me—we should take him on with us. And bury him there—”
“No,” he interrupted her, again pulling his daughter against him gently, reassuringly. “Allays best to leave a body where he’s been took from the living. It’s the most fitting thing.”
“I can’t bear to leave without him,” she confessed. “Don’t know how Roman was able to go from this place.”