The Quilt Walk (6 page)

We passed outfitting stores with tents, frying pans, rope, and wagon wheels. There were big shallow pans that Aunt Catherine said the prospectors used to wash gold out of the streams and there were picks for breaking rock. I saw heavy work pants and felt hats, rows of canned tomatoes and oysters and sardines. Sombreros and paper collars were piled on counters next to stacks of ammunition. And everywhere—on the counters, in windows, piled on top of bins of spices—were guidebooks to the Pike’s Peak country.

After visiting several places, we found a dry goods store and went inside, where Aunt Catherine fussed over the ribbons, selecting one that was a lavender plaid. “I’ll keep this in my pocket and take it out when no one is looking so that I’ll know I’m still a lady,” she said. “Now, Emmy Blue, pick out a ribbon for your braids.”

“Truly?” I asked. I had not brought hair ribbons with me.

“Of course. I have a little money of my own, and I expect to spend it frivolously. Who knows when I’ll ever have a chance to be carefree again? Choose a ribbon for Waxy, too.”

I went through the ribbons carefully, narrowing my choice to a yellow that was the color of the morning sun and a blue the color of the late afternoon sky. “Blue. It won’t show the dirt,” Aunt Catherine said when I asked her opinion. “But I believe Waxy would like the yellow.”

A clerk cut the ribbons for us, and Aunt Catherine added a packet of pins and a piece of red calico for Ma.

“What about the thread?” I asked as we left the store.

“Thread?” She looked confused. “I have plenty of thread. We don’t need any more thread.”

“But you said you needed some.”

“Oh, I did, didn’t I?” She smiled at me. “I guess your ma won’t mind that little fib. Bother about thread! Now, let’s go sit down in real chairs and have real tea,” she said, looking approvingly at the Patee House, a fine brick hotel across the street. “Surely they have a ladies ordinary.”

“A what?” I asked.

“It’s a tea room reserved for women, a place where we can sit and relax. There is one at the Quincy House at home.” She took my hand and led me across the street, through the lobby of the hotel into a room that was fitted with fragile chairs and tables. I felt out of place, because I still wore three dresses, but Aunt Catherine moved like a queen past the ladies in their fashionable frocks and bonnets. When I glanced around, I saw other women dressed in traveling clothes.

Aunt Catherine ordered tea and tiny cakes, and I perched on my chair trying to act ladylike and not put the entire cake into my mouth at one time.

“Going west are you?” asked a lady at the table next to us.

“We are,” Aunt Catherine replied. “And you?”

The woman nodded. “This is my wedding trip. I don’t suppose I’ll find tea and pastries in Denver.”

“We are going to Golden. We leave in two days,” Aunt Catherine told her.

“Why, maybe we’ll be on the same train.” The woman wiped her fingers on her napkin. Her hands were already brown and rough. “I am Lucy Bonner.”

Aunt Catherine told her our names, and the two of them chatted, but not for long. We had to return to the wagon before Pa and Uncle Will got back. So we took our leave. Aunt Catherine ordered three little cakes to take with us and put them into her bag.

Ma smiled when she saw the cakes, and the three of us sat on the wagon tongue, and we took tiny bites to make them last longer. We ate every crumb.

“Do you think we should have gotten cakes for Pa and Uncle Will?” I asked.

“No,” Ma and Aunt Catherine said together. Then the three of us began to laugh. I knew without their telling me that I should not mention our outing. That night, I told Waxy that I was learning something about how women keep secrets.

Chapter Eight

CROSSING THE MISSOURI

T
he Missouri wasn’t as wide as the Mississippi, but we still took a ferry to cross it. Pa said some people might let their oxen swim across, pulling the wagons, but he didn’t want to take a chance we’d overturn.

“Isn’t a ferry just as liable to tip over as a wagon?” Aunt Catherine asked.

“The ferries are stable,” Uncle Will told her. “Don’t you remember we took the ferry across the Mississippi?”

“I had my eyes closed the whole time,” she said.

“We’ll float across some of the smaller rivers later on,” Pa said. “That’s why we spread tar on the bottoms of the wagons before we left. They are tight as washbasins. We’ll be as dry as if we were on a steamboat.”

Early in the morning, we gathered with the other members of our wagon train. Ma nodded at some of the women, and Pa greeted one or two men he’d already met, but there wasn’t time to talk. We had to get across the Missouri, and Pa said that with all the wagons, the crossing could take the entire day. Our wagon master had already hired a guide, a man who was called Buttermilk John. He’d crossed the plains a dozen times before, and he would be our scout. He said he’d wake us up at dawn so we could get an early start. We’d stop at noon—
nooning
, he called it—then camp for the night when he found the right spot. Pa and the others would take turns being guards.

Buttermilk John looked like an Indian. He was dressed in a buckskin suit and moccasins, and his long hair was tied back with a strip of indigo calico. Pa said Buttermilk John’s looks didn’t matter. He was a good man who would get us through safely to Colorado Territory.

“Ye’ve got quite a load, old son,” Buttermilk John told Pa, when he inspected our wagon at the river. “I hope you don’t sink the ferry.”

“Thomas knows best,” Mother said.

“He was just joking,” Pa told her.

Ma asked, “Where should Emmy Blue ride, beside the wagon or on the seat with us?”

“On the seat, high up, where she can see.”

The Missouri was filled with ferries taking across prairie schooners and men on horseback. There were also dugouts, canoes manned by Indians. We’d seen the Indians racing their horses back and forth along the river when we were camped. Now they seemed to want to cross with us, and they pushed their boats alongside the ferries.

These Indians weren’t like the family of beggars we’d seen in St. Joseph. They were shirtless or else wore faded calico tops and had feathers and bits of bright cloth woven into their hair. They hailed us, begging for “beeskit, tobac, ko-fee.” They offered to row some of our load to the far side, but Pa said he wasn’t about to transfer anything in the middle of the Missouri River.

Ma held so tightly to the wagon seat that her knuckles lost their color, and I remembered that she couldn’t swim. I worried that if the wagon tipped over, she’d be lost in the brown river, maybe kicked by the oxen, who were churning the muddy water. Then I remembered I couldn’t swim either, and I grabbed hold of the seat as I looked into the water that was swirling and foaming from all the traffic. The river was as busy as downtown Quincy on Saturdays.

The river current was strong, and our ferry drifted downstream. Pa said he wasn’t worried. He told us it mattered more that we got across the river than where we ended up. The ferry landed, and Pa jumped out of the wagon and gathered the oxen, which had swum across beside us. Then he went back to the river to look for Uncle Will, but he couldn’t see him. “We’ll go on to the gathering place. He’ll likely be there,” Pa said.

Pa helped Ma and me down from the wagon, and we shook our skirts because they had gotten wet. We started to walk, but even though we had hemmed our dresses above our boot tops, the fabric was wet and dragged in the dirt.

“We’d best ride until we dry out, or our clothes will be covered with mud,” Ma said. So we climbed back onto the wagon and spread out our skirts to let the sun warm them.

We headed up the river to where the rest of the wagon train was gathering and finally found Uncle Will and Aunt Catherine. “Thank the Lord you’re all right, Meggie,” Aunt Catherine said. “I got to thinking, what if you were lost? I couldn’t bear it.” She lowered her voice. “I thank God you are with me, you and Emmy Blue. However could I go to Colorado Territory without you?”

“Or we you,” Ma replied.

Buttermilk John had crossed the river and told everyone to keep on going. “We won’t camp on the river for fear of ’quitoes. They’re big as horseflies,” he said. So we followed the other wagons a mile or two farther on, to a meadow. Those who’d crossed before us had already unpacked their wagons and spread their things on the ground to dry, because even the best wagons had taken on a little water.

“Ye made it did ye, Hatchett?” Buttermilk John said as he rode up to our wagon.

“Said I would,” Pa replied. But he added, “We took some water. I hadn’t expected that.”

“This is the hardest crossing ’tween here and Denver City,” Buttermilk John said. “We’ll have to cross the Platte River a time or three or four, but it’s not so deep, nothing a wagon like yours can’t handle. Look at that wagon over there.” Buttermilk John pointed with his chin. “The wagon’s made of green wood. This child thinks they’ll be lucky to make it halfway across the plains, if they don’t break down before.”

Buttermilk John went on to the next wagon, and I asked Pa, “How come he calls himself ‘this child’ and you ‘old son?’”

“He’s a mountain man. They talk that way.”

“What’s a mountain man?” I’d never heard of one.

“An old-time trapper. The trappers were the first white men in the West. They caught beaver and other animals for their fur. But the West has been trapped out. The animals were plentiful in the 1820s and ’30s, when the mountain men first arrived, but not now. Besides, with all the settlers coming in, there isn’t room for the mountain men anymore. So they work as guides. Some of them married Indian women and lived with the tribes. Their wives make their buckskin suits and bead them, making holes in the buckskin with a tool called an awl. Those Indian women work harder than any woman I ever met, except maybe your ma.”

I decided to tell Ma what Pa had said because he didn’t praise her very often.

After our wagon was unpacked and our wet things spread on the ground to dry, Pa and Uncle Will went to a meeting with the other men in the wagon train. A woman came over to Ma and Aunt Catherine and introduced herself. “I’m Esther Reid from Illinois, and we’re headed to Georgetown, Colorado, where we expect to find a gold mine. My husband does, at any rate. Me, I’d be happy to find a cabin with a feather bed to sleep on—that is, if there are feathers in Colorado.”

Aunt Catherine sat down on a box and took off her sunbonnet. “A feather bed would be nice, but I think I would like best to have a cook stove.” She’d burned the hem of one of her dresses in our campfire the first week out.

“A rocking chair. That’s what I’d like,” Ma said.

“You can come sit in mine any time you care to,” Mrs. Reid said to Ma. “I told my husband I’d as soon leave behind a wagon wheel as that chair. I have him take it down every night. That way I can sit by the fire with the Good Book and my piecing. I’m just as happy as if I was back at home.”

“It seems all of us have brought our piecing,” Ma said. “I do mine sitting on the wagon seat, and I’ve observed women stitch as they walk along.”

“Quilting’s a woman’s way of dealing with troubles. There’s nothing so bad that piecing with the colors doesn’t help,” Mrs. Reid said. “Working with a needle in my hand brings me peace.”

“Amen,” Aunt Catherine said.

“Does the young ’un quilt?” Mrs. Reid asked, looking over at me.

Ma looked to me to answer for myself, and I squirmed. “Not really,” I said.

“I believe she’d rather hunt insects and toadstools than sit with her quilting,” Ma explained.

“Of course, what troubles does a girl that age have? Nothing at all for her to worry about.”

“I think she might miss her home just a little,” Ma said.

I was pleased Ma remembered how much I’d missed our farm when we’d started out, although I didn’t think about it as much now.

Just then, another lady walked up and said, “Mrs. Hatchett.” Both Ma and Aunt Catherine were Mrs. Hatchett, because Pa and Uncle Will were brothers, so both of them turned to her.

“Mrs. Bonner,” Aunt Catherine said, recognizing the woman we’d met at the Patee House. She explained to Ma, “Mrs. Bonner sneaked off for tea, too. But she is a newly married woman, so I suppose her husband indulges her.”

Mrs. Bonner looked at the ground. “Owen was very angry and called me a common woman for going off by myself like that. He said I must ask his permission. He was right to punish me.”

“Punish you?” Aunt Catherine frowned.

“He said I am to sit in the wagon all day today and tomorrow and not be allowed to walk. He knows how I love to walk along. I am here only because he sent me to ask for the loan of a hammer.”

“Why of course,” Ma said. As Ma climbed into the wagon, Mrs. Bonner turned, and I could see bruises on her cheek. “You’ve hurt yourself,” Ma said, then put her hand over her mouth as if she should not have spoken.

“I am clumsy. I fell,” Mrs. Bonner said in a low voice, putting her hand to her cheek. “I must get back. Owen does not like me to be gone. I’ll return the hammer when he has finished.” She turned toward her wagon, and then said, “I can see he’s not there. He must have left with the other men to attend a meeting with Buttermilk John. I am glad to be with other women.”