Dreams Beneath Your Feet (15 page)

When they were finished eating, Julia said, “You may have been surprised that I brought Jay along, but I wanted you to meet him. He's very interesting, and has quite a story to tell.” She turned her chair a little toward Jay, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Jay, we are not taken in by your breechcloth and leggings. Why don't you tell us your real name? And why are you a woman living in disguise as a boy?”

Narcissa made a little squeak and put her hand over her mouth.

 

T
HE MAN-WOMAN SAID
, “My name is Lei, Lei Palua. I'm sorry, for what I've done; I . . . I was so afraid.”

“I know, Lei, but we must have answers.” Julia was tolerating no evasions.

“How much do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

Narcissa got up, saying, “I think we need another pot of tea.”

Alice Clarissa held up two dolls Hannibal made for her from deerskin and dewclaws and banged them together, like a war.

They drank more tea, and the whole story came out. How Lei had thought Kanaka Boy was the most exciting man she'd ever met. She was enthusiastic about his plan for Hawaiians to be traders, not just laborers. Ran off with him to the camp he and the men had picked out, a horrible place in a horrible desert. How the men made whiskey and stayed drunk all the time. How they brought up other women and passed them around. How they sold whiskey to the Indians. How she began to think of escape. Then the terrible day when they killed all the Digger men and the small
children and took the women and older children as slaves. Delicately, looking at Alice Clarissa, Lei told how the ruffians used the women.

Lei paused for breath. She looked into the eyes of her listeners nervously but saw only empathy. She gathered her courage and went on. She told how she escaped and fled down the Owyhee River, hoping to get to the fort. How Boy caught her. How his men raped her. And Boy took her to the hot springs to kill her.

“I, I overcame him the only way I could. He's fond of laudanum. I gave him triple the amount he's used to, and he passed out.”

Julia looked to see that Alice Clarissa was paying no attention and asked, “Did you kill him?”

“No.” Lei started to say one thing and said another. “No, I couldn't.” She decided not to mention the castration.

“Well, you've got plenty of reason to be scared.”

“Please.” Lei hated the begging tone in her voice, but she couldn't help it. “If I stay anywhere in this country, all of Oregon, he will find me and kill me. There are Hawaiians working at every post. If anyone sees me, my mother, my sister, my friends, the news will fly to him. That's why I came up with the deception. Jay.”

Now the shame left her face, and her voice took an edge. “Yes, true, Boy is a force of nature. But he is searching for his wife. His men will ask about a woman. So I cannot be Lei, only Jay.”

All four women looked inside themselves at this reality and were stilled by it.

“We'll keep your secret,” said Julia.

“From Sam and Hannibal and Flat Dog, too? I'm so scared.”

Julia looked at Narcissa and answered, “From everyone who is not in this room.” Narcissa nodded.

“I have to go to California,” said Lei. “Lots of people at Fort Walla Walla know me. My mother is at Fort Vancouver. I'm not safe until I get out of Oregon.”

Julia nodded, half to herself. “Yes.”

For a long moment no one spoke. Then Lei said, “How did you spot me?”

Julia said, “A woman knows.”

 

 

 

J
OE
M
EEK SHOWED
up low in his soul. “Rain left me,” he said. His Nez Percé wife, that is, the sister of Doc Newell's wife, Clap. “Back at Fort Hall she left me.”

Julia handed him a coffee cup, full to the brim and steaming.

“But I see Helen Mar,” said Esperanza. She nodded toward Joe's little daughter, playing with Doc's son at the Newell lodge nearby.

“That woman, she done left husband and child. If that ain't poor bull. I'm so lonesome I could snuggle up to a porcupine.”

Esperanza laughed. She liked Joe Meek—he was a clown. Now a sad clown, which made her like him even more.

“Jay,” said Julia, “would you grind us some more coffee?” Jay spent her time with Julia and Esperanza now, still dressed as Jay. She opened the leather pouch and began to use one rock to smash
the beans on a big, flat rock Flat Dog had dragged to the front of the lodge for the purpose.

“Joe,” Julia said, “have your wives left you before?”

Joe shrugged. Everyone knew the answer to that question.

She put an arm around his shoulders. “Two, at least?”

“Two,” he said. Joe was only thirty, but he'd been in the mountains eleven years.

“So you've had three
wives,
” Julia said, her arm still around him. She gave Esperanza a mischievous look. They both knew he'd had countless women.

Joe shrugged.

“You won't be lonely long.” Julia took her arm away. “So how was the trip?”

“Sam and Flat Dog was right. Them three wagons? Trouble three times over.”

Which everyone knew from the shape the wagons showed up in.

“On the Snake River plains we couldn't get the wagons through the sagebrushes, around the sagebrushes, in between the sagebrushes, or over the sagebrushes. Maybe we coulda cut down ever' one of the gnarly plants from Fort Hall to Fort Boise. When I think on it, maybe we coulda dug a tunnel from one fort to t'other and gone under them sagebrushes. What we done, though, we took the wagon boxes off and left 'em. Make somebody a nice fire one night. Brought just the running gear along.”

Jay filled the pot with water and put it back on the fire to brew.

Joe grinned. “Dr. Marcus Whitman,” he said, “he is making heroes of me and Doc—first men to get wagons to Oregon. We is the wave of the future, he says. On that case the women will have to be satisfied with getting their wagons here in the shape of skeletons and they'll have to go naked in Oregon. I mean, the living room will be naked, the kitchen will be naked, all their possessions will be naked, not the people. I'd druther it was the other way.

“I'd say, though, leaving them furnishings along the trail will be a service. Keep them as follows from getting lost.”

Julia asked, “Are we few the wave of the future, Joe? Hundreds of Americans to come?”

“I don' know. Ever' one thinks so,” said Joe. “But white women can't stand life so disorder-like. Ain't nobody out here follows their ideas of order, particular not the Indians.”

“Don't talk like that, Joe,” said Sam Morgan, walking up. “Julia's a white woman.” Which was only more or less true.

Jay checked the pot and said, “Coffee's ready.”

Sam sat down at the fire, and Doc Newell slipped in next to him. “Joe's just downhearted,” Doc said. “Surely and truly, we are the future, right here as we stand. Oregon is the greatest country in the world for the agriculturalist.” For a mountain man Doc Newell talked funny.

Sam watched Jay pour them coffee. He'd begun to have a different idea about this boy.

“No more of that talk that divides us into white and Indian,” said Julia.

“White people are about to come in a tidal wave,” said Doc, “because of the missionaries.”

Sam hated this subject. Yes, red and white. Yes, waves of Americans. And the end of the Crow way of life, just as Owl Woman predicted. The whole Plains Indian way of life. Still, he was glad about his own outfit, and Doc and Joe's—more mixed-blood children going to settle on the western coast.

Joe said, “Some wagoneers we is. Them wagons is sure finished, and they near finished us.”

Doc said to the party, “We're obliged to make a decision to leave the wagons here. Big mountains ahead, the Cascades. The route is the river gorge. If you go through with horses, it's narrow and rough. If you raft the river, there are big waterfalls, and you have to portage.”

“What I hear is, it ain't no wagon road,” said Joe. “Them
wagons cost me my wife,” he said. “She wouldn't have no truck with wagon-driving fools.”

“Maybe it was Oregon,” said Doc. “She just wanted to stay near her people. Or maybe it was your drinking. Or your tomcatting around.”

“Doc here,” complained Joe, “he's got it all figgered out.”

“I do. The way to work it is, float the wagons the rest of the way,” said Doc. “From here the Hudson's Bay Company takes the fur down in bateaux. We'll use the river as our highway.”

“Where I come from,” said Joe, “we'd be honest and say the road stops more'n two hundred miles from where we mean to go.”

Doc sighed. Finally he said, “Excuse me, please,” and walked toward his lodge. He turned back and said, “The bateaux will be starting downriver in about two weeks, and the Newell party will be going.” As he walked on, his spine was straighter and stiffer than it needed to be.

“Appears your brother-in-law doesn't see things the same as you,” said Sam.

“Ex-brother-in-law,” said Joe.

“And what about your daughter, and Doc's son?” asked Julia.

Joe twisted his mouth. “We're leaving 'em with the Whitmans for now. We've done wore 'em out.”

The children did look wasted.

“The Whitmans are kind to take them in,” said Julia.

“Good people,” said Joe.

“More for Narcissa to do,” said Julia.

“Joe,” said Esperanza, “come with me. I want to show you my new trick.” Esperanza had been learning trick riding from Uncle Hannibal and Papa Sam for years, and Joe was her favorite audience.

“Let's go, sweet pie,” said Joe.

 

S
AM UNHOBBLED
P
ALADIN
and led her toward the ring Esperanza would use. She would want the more experienced mare as
well as her own pony. Hannibal and Flat Dog fell in with him and strolled to the ring she had laid out, using willow branches. Esperanza waited, her pony, Vermilion, standing free. Jay and Joe Meek sat cross-legged and watched eagerly.

Sam looked from his daughter to the man-woman, and inside himself he shrugged. Ever since they left her home village, Esperanza had been moody. Sometimes she was cheerful and like a kid again. Most of the time she was irritable. At those times she wouldn't talk to anyone but Jay the
ba'te,
and that helped, Sam didn't know how. So Jay was fine with Sam.

He took the lead off Paladin and looked at Esperanza and declared, “Let the good times roll.”

Esperanza did a running vault onto her pony from behind. The difference was that she came to rest on her feet, not her bottom, and immediately stood up, hands held high. At a cluck Vermilion began to canter around the ring.

“Hot damn!” shouted Joe Meek. He whooped. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Esperanza glided by, balanced on the back of her loping horse. As she passed them, she made a curtsey to her small audience.

“I ain't seen nothin' like that afore,” said Joe.

Sam said, “These Indians haven't, either.”

 

 

 

“T
HREE, SEE
,” J
ULIA
said. The whole meadow was squishy with water and violet with flowers. “They're camas, a kind of lily, and you can eat the bulb.” Mother, daughter, and Jay spread out, holding sacks to fill.

“Only the violet ones,” said Julia. “The ones with the white flowers, that's the death camas.”

As she picked, Esperanza felt drawn to the few lilies with the white flowers. Squatting, she pulled a white-petaled plant with her right hand and a lilac-petaled one with her left hand. The bulbs looked just alike. Life and death, just alike.

She looked around and saw that her mother and Jay were stooped and picking well away, too far to see what Esperanza was doing.

Esperanza felt the allure. The bulbs that you boil or roast? Or the ones that end all troubles?

She had known for half a moon now. One morning, when she was lying flat on her stomach and letting her mother do the breakfast work by herself, she felt a flip-flop in her belly. Then it came again, a sensation just like a fish was wiggling inside her.

She knew what it was. She had put her hand on the bellies of several other young women carrying babies. She even knew the word for it in English—the baby was said to quicken. The difference was, the other young women were glad to be filled with child.

Esperanza was . . . she didn't know what.

With child. One night with Prairie Chicken and now with child. But without husband.

Each morning, when the rising sun made the east side of the tipi glow, she felt the movement, lifted her blankets, and watched the skin of her belly make a wave.

With child, and with terror.

She let the death camas drop onto the mushy ground and put the other into her sack.

She looked long at the white one and then made herself look away.

I have to do something.

 

T
HE MEN WERE
pitching in to help with the work, too. Sam and Hannibal helped build cabins—they felled logs, dragged them to the building sites, trimmed them with drawknives, and joined them at the corners.

Flat Dog found a piece of work he really liked. One of the missionaries, Barker, came up and said, “I had an indescribable accident on my mare.” He showed them his saddle, which was split lengthwise down the middle. You could fold it like a book.

“We'll try to do som'p'n' on it,” said Whitfield, a new comrade who was a practical man.

When Barker was out of hearing, Hannibal picked up the
smashed saddle and inspected it. “He must be an indescribable rider,” Hannibal said.

None of them could guess exactly what had happened. “Some way that mare of his came down flat on her back,” said Flat Dog.