St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (12 page)

“Hey, Clem?” I asked him. “What does your father talk about with your mother? You know, in your wagon?”

“Huh.” Clem frowned. “Your folks talk to each other?” He shrugged. “My mother mostly bangs pans around, or folds the blankets real loudly. Sometimes they pray together.”

Without anybody taking verbal notice, in imperceptible increments, we have slipped to the back of the company. After the third time Dad fainted, Mom quietly stepped down from the high seat and slid into the canopied box. Now Ma refuses to drive our wagon. She curls up with the girls on a feather ticking, and sleeps during the day. It has fallen to me, now, to drive my father.

Every morning, I wake up at dawn. The sky is still prickled with stars, and it will be a full hour before the first blue ribbon of smoke gasps up from the first campfire. I shake my father awake, and help him into the traces. It’s a special, single yoke, made to order. My father drinks a tiny glass of flame-colored liquid, his breakfast, while I clasp the collar slip around his neck, and secure the nails in his crescent shoes. Then I take the reins. I’m okay once we get rolling, but I’m still uncertain, a herky-jerky greenhorn, when it comes to the commands for stopping and starting:

“Gee? Oh! I mean…Haw! Sorry, Dad!”

Even when I close my eyes, now, I see the outline of my father’s back, swaying in front of me: the bent, pebbled steppe of his vertebrae, bruise-purple from sun and toil, the shock of his bull’s mane tumbling out of his hat, bleached to the color of old milk.

Gus traded his mouth organ for a sock and a sack of millet, so now we travel in silence. I miss the camaraderie of that first prairie, everybody traveling with a single aim, to the same place, and music even on the worst days. The lighter our wagons get, the quieter our daily sojourn becomes, and the more determined we are to get there and be rid of one another. The lumberwomen are mute and sour, except for the hollow growl of their hunger-barrels. At night, after we make camp, they break long bouts of wordlessness to ask for whiskey and matches and soda crackers, and various other Trail alms.

“Don’t you give them anything, Jacob,” my mother hisses. “Remember, if you give those women so much as a single cracker, you are taking it from your sisters’ mouths.”

Lately, my parents can’t seem to agree on the value of things. Last night, well after eleven o’clock, my father trotted back to our wagon, bashful and out of breath, fresh from a barter with the local Indians.

“Velina! Open your mouth, close your eyes, I have for you a great surprise….”

Then he put a raw kernel of corn on her tongue, and waited, beaming, for her reaction.

My mother smiled beautifully, rolling the kernel in her mouth. “Oh, Asterion! Where did you get this?”

“I sold our whiffletree,” Dad said proudly. He pulled an ear of green corn out of his back pocket and, with a magician’s flourish, stroked her cheek with the silky husk.

“You what?” My mother’s eyes flew open. She spit corn in his face. “You did what?” Then she took hold of his horns and drew him towards her, slowly, half laughing and half crying, pressing her face against the white diamond at the bridge of his nose. “You did
what
?”

Dad’s nostrils flared; he lowered his head and pawed at the caked dirt. I dove into the wagon and slid beneath the blankets with my sisters. The candles had guttered out, but moonlight seeped through the rips in our wagon bonnet.

“Girls?”

Maisy opened one brown eye and held a finger to her lips. Dotes had her fist in her mouth, stifling a cough. I felt proud and sad that my sisters knew enough to pretend to be asleep. Outside, our parents were still arguing:

“Is that what we’re worth to you,” my mother was yelling, “five dollars and an ear of green corn?”

“…besides,
you
were the one who said you wanted corn….”

“Do you even have any idea how to repair a whiffletree, Asterion?…Well, I hope that is some consolation to you, when the wolves are gnawing on your daughters’ bones….”

“C’mon,” I said, loosening the cinched portal and sneaking my sisters out the back. I carried them over to the Grouses’, two wagons down.

“Hey, Clem,” I said. “Can we sleep in your wagon tonight?”

“No,” Clem said sadly. “No, my ma says that we’re only allowed to be friends in church now. They think your dad gave me lice.” He brightened. “You can sleep under the wagon.” We all peered beneath the hickory box. The under-carriage of the wagon was white and wormy. Light leaked through the planks, a palsied glow, sopped up by a dark mosaic of soil. In the dead center, the darkness pooled and shifted. Dotes gasped. It was a clotted mass of dogs, spotted dogs, yellow dogs, swimming dogs, all huddled together for warmth.

“You first,” Maisy said.

Today I was poking at the fringes of the campfire, gathering stones for my collection, when I overheard some of the other men talking about my father.

“That Minotaur is spreading sucking lice to the children!” Mr. Grouse said, shaking and red, with a rage out of all proportion to his insect allegation. “He is titillating the milk cows, and curdling our children’s milk!” I flattened myself against the ground and inched forward. The other emigrants were all frowning and nodding. Watching them, I could see the way Mr. Grouse’s anger spread from man to man, the hot, viral coil of it, a warmth the men breathed in like a welcome fever.

It’s enough to make you hate people.

I ran off to find Clem. He was out back, catching lizards behind the corral.

“Howdy-howdy, Jacob…Ow!”

I butted him in the ribs, sharply, wishing fervently that I had inherited my father’s antlered might. I butted him once, twice, and then stomped on his buckskin shoes.

“What was that for?”

“If you don’t know, I am not going to tell you.” I ran off into the sunset, crying hot, frustrated tears, cursing the Grouses at the top of my lungs. Then I lost sight of the wagons, and got scared, and ran back. I hoped Clem wasn’t watching.

When everybody was ladling soup at the bean cauldrons, I snuck into Clem’s wagon. I stole his sisters’ dolls, the ones the Grouse girls have been making out of cornhusks since Fort Charity, and ate them. In my vengative fury, I forgot to remove the button eyes. My stomach is still cramping.

I hope the West is big enough for us to really spread out. It’s a terrible thought, one of my worst fears, that we are going to get there, and these people will still be our neighbors.

Three nights ago, I was sleeping under my own family wagon, my bare arms and face covered in a fine cedar dust from the box, and dreaming of the most ordinary things, chalk and pillows and ceiling boards, pitchers of lemonade and gooseberry pies, when I woke to a hand—not my own—pinching at my cheek.

“Wake up, Jacob.”

I rolled over, eye level with the tip of my mother’s caulked boot. I slid out from under the wagon. Ma had Maisy in one arm and Dotes in the other. Their eyes looked shiny and protuberant; their throats bulged with the echo of swallowed coughs. I felt the danger, too, sensed it with an animal intuitiveness, and froze.

“Come out of there, Jacob.” My mother spoke in a low, careful tone. “Come gather your things.”

“Why?” I was surprised at how alert I sounded, wide awake, without a trace of grogginess.

“Circumstances have obliged us,” she glanced nervously over her shoulder, “to part ways with your father.”

I gaped up at my mother, and let her words sink in. I’d known for some time that a change was coming; I welcomed the idea of it, I
wanted
it, almost, or tried to want it, like my ambivalent prayers for rain in open country. But
parting ways
! This was a lunatic move, ghastly and extreme, like digging up coffins because we needed some wood.

“Jacob,” she pleaded. “Now.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. I drew my blanket up around my chin, flat with panic, and wedged myself under the carriage.

“No.”

Ma bit her lip miserably. She squatted in the dust, inches from my face. I could see my name, two puffs, in the chilly air.

“Ja-cob!”

I linked my arm around a wheel axle, and glared at her, daring her to try to grab me. The spokes shifted, ever so slightly, sending up a pearly exhumation of sand and flint. A light came on in our wagon.

“Velina? Is that you?”

With a soft, defeated cry, my mother rose to her feet. She glanced down at me a final time, pressing her hand to her cheek. Then she stumbled back towards my father’s voice, the amber penumbra of our wagon.

The Trail is full of surprises. The following morning, Mr. Grouse announced that two wagons had deserted our party, the Quigleys and the Howells, heading back east. My mother was seated by the campfires, boiling water for porridge, and she received this news without so much as a
huh,
an anesthetized murmur. I waited for her to look up at me, but she just sat there, staring blankly at the bubbles.

And then, just when I was at my most muddled, besieged by all sorts of flickering, waxy fears, another surprise. Through the orange transparency of our tarp, I saw my parents’ silhouettes, blurring together into a single, monstrous shadow. I held my eye up to a hole in the cover. Dad’s head was in my mother’s lap. His great eyes were shut. My mother had an iron bucket, and a thin, dirty kerchief. She was daubing a whitish solution of borax, sugar, and alum onto the sores beneath his fur. My dad was running his long, rough tongue over her boots, licking up the lichens and the toxic-colored spoors. His horns scraped against the floorboards. “I love you,” my mother kept muttering, over and over, pushing the rag into his wounds, “I love you,” as if she was trying to torture the true meaning out of the words. My father groaned his response.

So much of what passes between my parents on the Trail is illegible to me. It’s as if they speak a private language, some animal cuneiform, pawing messages to each other in the red dirt. During the day, my father continues to pull our wagon forward. My mother hasn’t spoken of that evening since….

Mr. Grouse’s oxen died in their traces today. They were a team, his beloved blue-ribbon leaders, Quick and Nimble. It took three men to cut them loose. All I could focus on was the coiled rope, slack and slick with blood, and the thought that Clem would probably not be interested in ball plays for a while. All the mothers shielded our eyes, and scooted us towards the wagons. They said that the oxen had “failed in the traces,” their euphemism to protect the youngest children, which seemed a little silly to me, since everybody had to step over a big dead ox.

“Ma,” Dotes asked, making a paper daisy chain in the wagon, “if I die, promise you’ll dig a grave deep enough so the wolves can’t get at me?”

My mother looked up from her knitting with a bleary horror. “Oh, sweetheart”—she poked her head out the wagon—“are you hearing this, Asterion?”

We all looked outside, to where Dad was standing in high, dun-colored grasses with the other men. They directed, while he used his hooves to tamp down some perfunctory dirt over Nimble. Lately, the men’s requests have grown a lot less obsequious. Just the other day, Vilner Pratt persuaded my father to wear a silver cow bell so that the company will know when he’s coming. (“You have a tendency to sneak up on a man, Mr. Minotaur.” Vilner shrugged, with an aw-shucks sort of malice. “And to tell you the truth, it spooks our women.”)

At the sound of my mother’s voice, our father looked up, and waved. His horns and hide have darkened to a dull yellow-gray; the skin hangs loosely from his arms.

“Ma,” Maisy asked, sucking on the fizzled wick of an old flare. “Is Dad going to fail in the traces?”

There was a time when my mother would have said no, and reassured us with shock or laughter. These days, she leaves our hair unwashed and our questions unanswered. “How should I know, Maisy? What can I know? You go and ask your father. You go and tell your father,” Ma said, her eyes glinting like nail heads, “what you are afraid of.”

Finally, we have reached the bluffs. From up here, we can see the midway point, the alkali desert of the Great Sink. It’s a tough landmark to celebrate. The Great Sink is a weird, treeless terrain. Even the clouds look flat and waterless. A wide, dry canal cuts through the desert, a conglomerate rut, winnowed out by a thousand wagons. It looks as if someone has dug out the spine of the desert. The Great Sink reminds me of home, an Olympian version of the trenches that Dad used to paw in our kitchen. When I mentioned this to Ma, she laughed for the first time in many days.

This patch of our journey feels like a glum, perpetual noon. The lumberwomen are in low spirits; there is no wood for them to hack at. Suddenly, their curses sound hoarse and sincere. Wolves skulk around our wagons by day, just beyond rifle shot. Clem and I scare them off by singing hymns and patriotic ditties. Above us, the pale sky is greased with birds.

Inside our wagon, Dotes shivers beneath three horsehide blankets. Maisy sleeps and sleeps. Yesterday, Ma wanted us to stop, but my father was afraid of losing the company. At night they stepped outside again, to take a spousal conscience. Ma made me hold up the curtain of modesty, now soiled and tissue-thin, as a courtesy for our neighbors.

“Do you see any doctors around here?” Dad asked, making a big show of looking under a rock. He squeezed the rock in his fist, crushing it to powder. “Any medicine? Be brave, Velina. We have to press on now, we are over halfway there—”

He broke off abruptly. I had lowered the curtain. My arms were tired, and I had to itch my nose. Our eyes met, and my father saw something in my expression that made him trot over.

“Jacob.” His teeth were shining. He wobbled a little, eyes burning, his hair on end, full of a radiant, precarious cheer, like our town drunk. He touched the nick in his horn to my cheek.

“Don’t pay her any mind, son. We’ll get there. Have a little faith in your father.”

Then he picked me up and waltzed me through the ashes of our campfire. “Hold on, son!” He charged around and around the corral, making his shoulder muscles buckle and snap like oilcloth, an impromptu rodeo. “Gee!” I pleaded, giggling in spite of myself, “Haw!”