The Way West (13 page)

   "Ya. Better to keep ahead, you bet," Brewer said.
   In his astonishment at Mack, in his rising vexation, Tadlock spoke sharply. "If someone didn't push, the whole company would sit on its tail."
   "If one of us was sick, I think we'd want the train to wait." Fairman put in.
   So they were all against him, Tadlock thought incredulously, all but the thickheaded German. He had led them, he had worked, organized, directed, pushed -and they were all against him. Or were they? When it came finally to decision, wouldn't Mack and Fairman side with him? "Let's vote," he said. "Mack, Fairman, I assume you'll support my recommendation."
   Mack answered, "No." The smile was gone from his face. Fairman was shaking his head.
   "No!"
   "No," Mack said again. Fairman kept shaking his head.
   Evans tossed a piece of buffalo dung at his old gray-whiskered dog, which was digging in a hole near by. "Reckon you'll have to wait, Tadlock," he said.
   Tadlock felt the blood hot in his face. "All I have to say is that it's a goddam-fool decision."
   Mack spoke quietly. "I have to tell you something else."
   "What?"
   "There's a meeting tonight."
   "Meeting?"
   "Whole company."
   "For what?"
   "Can't you guess?"
   "This is a guessing game, is it?"
   "They're going to unseat you, Irvine."
   "You're a goddam liar!"
   "I'll wait for your apology."
   The meaning of Mack's words, the full import, came to Tadlock slowly. He clenched words back while he considered it. They meant to kick him out. They meant to elect a new captain. He could see how the thing had come about. Patch, the little, stiff-necked New Englander, Daugherty, Gorham, Carpenter -these men, he had known, opposed him, and now they had politicked around, trading on the unpopularity of leadership, making big this little issue of the sick man. "We'll see about that," he said to Mack. "I'll stand on my position about Martin."
   "Can't you see it's not just that?" Mack asked.
   "I see. I called you a fool, and that's what you were."
   "The world is all a fool to you," the Irishman put in.
   "I was a fool all right," Mack said, the color climbing in his face, "but it's not that either, Irvine. It's the airs you have. It's overbearance."
   "And it is your animals and not enough men for them that slow the train -and you forever cryin' for speed," Daugherty added. "And it is you and your pushiness that sour us, and that's the God's truth."
   "You say you're not sore," Tadlock said to Mack. "Then where do you stand?"
   "I've got to vote for harmony."
   "What about you, Fairman?"
   Fairman said, "Same here."
   "You can't get away with it."
   "You tell him, Brewer," Daugherty said.
   "I be for you," the German explained. "McBee, too. But ve not be enough."
   So it was true. So they had conspired against him. So he had to resign or suffer the humiliation of being voted out. Brewer wouldn't lie to him. "That's the thanks a man gets. I've worked, figured, risked my neck."
   Evans said -and Mack nodded to the words- "That's what makes it hard, Tadlock."
   "I can split this train in two. I have a few friends."
   "You're losin' 'em by the minute," Evans said with what for him was heat.
Tadlock lurched to his feet. "To hell with all of youl" Not until he had taken a half a dozen steps away could he bring himself to throw back, "I resign."
   Tadlock walked to his lead wagon. "I just quit," he told his wife.
   She was seated on a box, mending a pair of trousers that he had ripped in loading the wagon. She gazed at him without speaking.
   "It was resign or get kicked out," he went on, getting a kind of perverse satisfaction out of the admission.
  Still she didn't speak. In ten years of married life, he thought with a stir of pleasure, she had learned better than to inquire into his business. What he wanted her to know, he would tell her. He waited, almost hoping she would put a question so that he could spend his outrage on her.
   When he didn't go on, she said, "Martin's worse."
   "I guess that's my fault!"
   "I didn't mean it was anybody's fault."
   "If we'd been traveling, everyone would have said it was mine. They'd have been glad to say that."
   "I'm glad you resigned."
   "So you're glad, are you!"
   "You take it so hard."
   He grunted, disarmed. She was one, anyhow, who knew how much he gave.
   She stitched quietly for a minute as if thinking about him and his resignation, but when she spoke it was to say, "Martin depended on you. I think you were the only friend he had."
  "I don't know anything to do for him."
   "I know, but-"
   He walked around to Martin's tent. Brother Weatherby was outside, holding an old Bible.
   Tadlock asked, "Well?"
   "I have been praying. The Lord's will be done." "Out of his head?"
   "Now. Yes."
   Tadlock stuck his head inside the tent. Martin lay on his back, his mouth open and his eyeballs showing white through lids not quite closed. Listening, Tadlock heard the light, fast breath of fever. He stepped back, repelled by the sight and sound and smell of sickness. There was nothing he could do, he told himself. What did they think he was? A doctor?
   Weatherby said, "I think he saw the light."
   "Calomel work?"
   Weatherby nodded, and Tadlock went back to his wagon.
   He spent a bitter, fiddley day. He kept going over what had happened and experienced each time a renewed injury and anger. He examined and repaired wagons and equipment and went back twice to Martin's tent. On his second trip he found Martin alone and soiled and senseless. Here was something he could do. Here was something, by God, he would do. No one could say he was indifferent or neglectful or heedless of the discipline he asked of others. Washing Martin off, he wondered fiercely who would do as much. As he finished, Byrd came in. Byrd had a lancet and thought, like others, that bleeding would be good for Martin. Tadlock helped bleed him.
   The meeting of the men at night was what might have been expected -a common hurly-burly made more orderless by the women and children who were allowed to press around. Thinking about it afterwards, Tadlock was still surprised that Evans and not Patch was elected to succeed him. He would have sworn that Patch was agitating in the interests of himself. Evans himself had acted honestly astonished when Mack put his name in nomination. He had turned and looked at his wife and then stumbled ahead. "Nope, Mr. Chairman. I ain't cut out for it."
   Seated at a little distance where he could hear and see enough but still not dignify the meeting with his presence, Tadlock had caught the look on Mrs. Evans' face. It was an expression he couldn't describe, of motherliness, concern, pride, assurance, Ambition -he didn't know what. But for an instant, before he thrust it aside, he had the feeling it would be good to be looked at that way. His second thought was that only big, dull, forceless men ever could be so regarded.
   Another thing stuck in his memory as he sat by his wagon in the gathering dark after the meeting had adjourned. It was the parliamentary disorder that was allowed to prevail, the promise of the general disorder to come. While Evans' name was still in nomination, Turley piped up, irrelevant to the subject, and Patch let him proceed. "We're a-turnin' back." Turley's voice was a high whine. "Me and my woman and young'uns, we're a-turnin' back, by Moses!"
   Mrs. Turley shouted from among the women, "Amen! Amen!" Tadlock heard her crying hysterically afterwards, as he had heard overwrought women cry at revivals.
   "We're headin' backwards for the Meramec," Turley went on, "seein's this company won't wait for others and seein's everybody is at outs besides. Who wants to turn back with us, welcome."
   Patch asked, "What about it, Summers?"
   Summers stood off to Patch's right. He said one word: "Dangerous."
   A little silence followed -except for Mrs. Turley's crying that Patch broke by asking, "Anyone else want to turn back?" He waited. "Byrd?"
   That, Tadlock had thought through his bitterness, was good management, was one accidental stroke of good management. Let Byrd say yes or no. Get him committed and hold him to it.
   Byrd said he'd stick.
   Patch went on, "If anyone plans to split off from the train, we'd like to know it now." He didn't look toward Tadlock but others turned to do so. Tadlock stared back, silent and unmoving. Split off? How could he split off? It was an impulsive threat he'd made. Who would go with him? Brewer and McBee and Martin, maybe, if he lived. A sorry lot, without oxen enough and some of those already sore of foot. He sat stiff and wordless, but he wanted to jump up and cry out, calling them the ingrates that they were. He felt like rising with his whip and lashing them one and all until they saw the truth of things. Cattle? Drivers? The charge was just a cheap excuse. Hadn't he brought Martin along and scoured Independence for a man and finally made a deal with Hank McBee to help out with the hundred and ten head of stock he had? Hadn't he done the best he could -and not because they forced him to it, either?
   For a long time after the session was over Tadlock sat still, seeing but still not seeing the people who passed gingerly, knowing his wife had gone somewhere and wondering how she could mix with those who had mistreated him.
   The camp quieted to low, good-night tones and by and by they quieted, too, and of human voices there was just a murmur from Martin's tent, which had been pitched at the other side of the corral where water was close. One by one the fires winked out. The stars came on, cold-bright as faraway suns. Southward Tadlock could see the horizon rolling against the sky. A child cried in one of the tents, cried a frail cry that silence closed around.
   Tadlock, he thought, trying to see the name apart from himself. Irvine Tadlock, who'd left a paying business in Peoria to try his talents in a bigger field and had been undone by ragtag emigrants. Tadlock, who liked discipline and method and knew how to organize, who, but for the stories this crowd would take along, might in time have been the territorial governor, the governor of the eventual state.
   What now? he asked. What, since these chuckleheads could blight him? Texas? Could he get to Texas? Just this past spring it had been asked into the Union. It would need leaders -a governor, senators, representatives. California? Some said California was a better place than Oregon. It would offer opportunities. It would stand in need of able men.
   He felt his wife's hand on his shoulder. "You'd better come to bed, Irvine."
   "I know when it's bedtime. You don't need to tell me when to go to bed."
   "It's late, Irvine."
   "What of it? I've got to look at Martin yet."
   "I've been there. There's nothing more you can do. They're trying mustard."
   "You go on to bed."
   He waited a few minutes, just to assert himself, and then got up and went into the tent and took off his coat and hat and shoes. Texas? California? They needed men all right. They needed leaders.
He stepped outside in his bare feet and picked up the whip that he had forgotten on the ground and put it in his wagon and went back into the tent and lay down by his wife.
   He was just getting to sleep, after what seemed a lifetime of sleeplessness, when Weatherby came by to tell him Martin had died.
 

EVANS LAID the yoke on one of his oxen and pinned the bow and spoke to the teammate, holding the yoke up while the second animal stepped into place, its ankles creaking. It was a satisfaction to a man to have well-trained stock, he told himself while he worked. Saved time and trouble.
   When he had his teams yoked and ready to hitch, he looked at the watch Mack had lent him. Six-forty. He would be ready in good time, as befitted the captain. Not all the tents were struck yet, nor the wagons loaded. Inside the corral where he stood some of the other men were beginning to get busy with oxen just driven in, and outside it others were pulling tent pegs and lowering poles and folding the tents afterwards and then lifting their plunder into the wagons. They worked fast, grunting to their chores as men did with sleep still in them and the muscles stiff from the night. The women had scraped and scoured the breakfast things and stood inside the wagons, helping arrange the loads. Or they had wandered off, some with their young ones in tow, to empty themselves and so be ready for the morning drive.
   Morning, Evans thought, was a time of fret, before the circle broke and the train got strung out on the trail. When the men quit their grunting it was to speak sharp, and to be answered sharp by women who were tired, too, and felt the load of the day too heavy. The young ones cried or yelled, being cranky or frisky, one. The boxes made a clatter as they were pitched into wagon beds. Now and then one of the oxen driven in for yoking would line out neck and head and let out a long bawl. Underneath the louder noises was the steady hum of mosquitoes that made a little cloud around every head.
   Evans stooped and gave Rock a pat on the head and straightened and stretched, pulling in a deep breath through his mouth.
   The air had a taste to it here, a taste light and sharp as highspirit drink. For all the fret he felt good.
   "Be a nice day, Becky," he said, looking between the wagons to where she worked outside. She had just closed and latched with its leather hasp the box that held pots and kettles and tools to eat with.
   "I almost wish it would blow and clear out the mosquitoes," she said.
   "They won't be so bad oncet we roll. Ain't hardly a stir of air."
   It was cool enough, but the sun was beginning to work. In the direction of it he saw Courthouse Rock, looming big yet, its near side purple with shadow. Off to his right apiece Chimney Rock rose slim and rusty. In a land that was all pretty much the same a man wouldn't think to see so much color-purple and rust, the gray of the sandbars, the sun slanted yellow as butter on the long flats, the sky so blue it hurt the eye. In all the sky there wasn't a cloud.
   He said, "I never feel so sure as on a good morning."
   "Sure?"
   "About everything." He stepped across and lifted the cookbox and put it in the wagon and brought the cover snug with its drawstring. "Nothing left but to hitch."
   He stepped back into the corral and angled through the oxen, looking to see if anyone needed help, and came to where Hig and Fairman were wrestling with an ornery steer. They had a rope over its horns that Hig was trying to hold while Fairman lifted the yoke. They held up when they saw him.
   Hig gave Evans his thin smile while he bent back with the rope. "I'd as lief yoke a buffalo as this damn ox."
   "Whyn't you take a hitch on a spoke?"
   "Comin' to that," Hig answered. "On'y I hate to. I got a bet up with this critter, by God, that I'll hold him or bust." Keeping the rope tight with one hand, he took the loose end of it with the other and looped it over a wheel spoke and drew it up. "I'm busted."
   Evans clapped the ox on the rump. It stepped ahead balkily while Hig snubbed it.
   "I'm shy of good work stock," Fairman said, his forehead wrinkled with the thought of it. He rubbed the mosquitoes off the back of one hand. "Sore feet. The sand wears the hoofs down to nothing."
   "Same with all of us. By and by the hoofs'll get tougher, they tell me. I been cleanin' 'em off and puttin' hot tar in the cracks."
   Evans walked on. Dick Summers was throwing packs on a couple of horses, packs that held his little plunder and that of Brother Weatherby. Weatherby stood by, as always, looking as if he'd like to help if only he knew how. Evans spoke to them and got Dick's quiet grin and a solemn nod from Weatherby.
   "Ready," Dick said, tying one horse to the pack saddle of the other. He took the lead rope. "Reckon they'd foller all right, but maybe I better tie on to your wagon again. Might scour off."
   "I'll be along."
   It seemed everybody was about ready, even the McBees, who couldn't ever seem to be on time. Until lately they couldn't, that was. "Mornin'." His idea was working all right, Evans thought, feeling again part proud and part guilty that it was. He hadn't been captain long until he called the men together one night, to find what was on their minds and to hear any grumbles and especially to cure the fault of late and ragged starting. He had told Mack his idea, and Mack had helped him, asking the men how about it: if a man was late he lost his place in line and had to bring up the rear? They had thought it was Mack's plan and had voted yes and now no one was late; but ,till Evans felt a little guilty. It struck him as somehow sneaky, this trick of rigging a meeting. It was better, though, than laying down the law on his own, better than cracking an ox whip.
   McBee said, "How be you?" and Mrs. McBee stuck her head f rom the tail of the wagon and gave him a pleasant good morning. Three McBee boys were chasing each other. They circled around and stopped, looking at Evans from under hair that didn't know a comb. Evans didn't see Mercy around.
   "What we waitin' fer?" McBee asked, set up over being ready. His whiskers moved to a smile.
   Evans consulted his watch. "'Bout time." Looking between the wagons, he saw the horse herd, out for its quick morning graze, and the loose cattle that Brownie and the other drivers had brought close.
   "Been meanin' to talk to you," McBee told him as if he had something important on his mind.
   "About what?"
   "I'll be seein' you. It's personal-like."
   So it was personal. Evans didn't like the thought. "Any time."
   He went over to his own wagons and hitched the teams and saw Rebecca to her perch and took out his watch again. It was time, lacking a minute or so. Summers sat a horse at the wagon that would break the circle. It was already pulled out a little, ready for the start. Mounted near Summers were Shields and Carpenter and Brewer, who would ride ahead today. Evans could see Tadlock standing alongside Summers, holding his silver trumpet. Evans had asked Tadlock if he wouldn't keep on sounding the horn, just as he did while captain. Out of a kind of sympathy he'd asked him, thinking maybe Tadlock prized the task. Besides, the trumpet was Tadlock's. Evans had to grin at himself, wondering which was the real reason. Anyhow, Tadlock had agreed, in that new and hard-eyed way of his.
  Tadlock looked across at him, and Evans raised his arm, and the trumpet sounded. Teamsters spoke. Whips popped. Oxen pushed into the yokes. Axles whined. Dust puffed up. With commands and pops, with whines and dust the circle unwound. The On-to-Oregon train was rolling. Evans' place was near the tail of the line. Walking out a little from his team, he could see Summers and the horsemen and the wagons lurching along behind them, the distance from wagon to wagon growing as the train settled to the drive. They would be farther spread before the morning was over. It was a thing he must watch, he reminded himself. They could be too far spread for safety against Indians. Back of him the loose stock was ambling into line.
   Indians could raise the devil if they wanted to, though he didn't look for them to do it, not since a bunch of mounted soldiers had passed by. Dragoons, they called themselves, the First Dragoons, led by a Colonel Kearny, who said their purpose was to awe the Indians and to warn them they'd better leave the emigrants alone. Three hundred men or thereabouts were in the bunch, not to mention wagons drawn by mules and two wheeled cannons and butcher beef and sheep that came along behind. They were in a hurry, bound for Laramie and onward to the Southern Pass, where they'd turn back. Watching them press on, their blues and golds proud in the rising dust, Evans had felt easier in his captaincy.
   Other things were right enough. People were in good spirit and in good health except for the diarrhea that Platte water or too much fresh meat brought on. They had got across the South Platte, double-yoking every wagon on the advice of Summers and stringing ropes between some and splashing through the quicksand fast. For a while they had followed along the north shore and then angled across and come to Ash Hollow and the North Fork. It was a good place to remember, Ash Hollow was. "There was shade there and cool-water springs and good grass, and the wagons had got down the hills that ringed it with no more damage than one tip-over.
   So, in time, they had reached Courthouse Rock and the tower that stood close by and had camped on a creek there, and people had felt like celebrating, as if, coming to a known name, they could be sure they were on the right track. Or more as if they were nearing home and had caught sight of a thing to mark it by. The celebration was quiet, though. Weatherby had field services, and nobody had made light of him, thinking of Martin and the Turleys.
   For a long time the Turleys had been in sight after the train pulled out. They had squatted there with their old wagon and their few head of stock, refusing to go with the company but still not starting the other way, as if quitting the bunch had taken all their get-up and now they would just wait for whatever. They had squatted, Turley and Mrs. Turley and their two thin children, watching out of stubborn eyes, saying thanks and no more for the sweetening and flour and bacon that Rebecca and Mrs. Mack and Mrs. Tadlock had left with them against the time that buffalo and antelope ran out. To watch them, to hear their noisy mouths now held to a bare word or two, a man would think that the company was treating them wrong. It wasn't so, but still no one felt quite easy. Like the others, Evans kept turning his head as the train went on, realizing as the distance grew how small the Turleys were a man and his woman and his young ones and a ramshackle outfit pressed on all sides by the great emptiness, or not pressed but loose and lost on the long flats, among the bald sand hills.
   After what seemed a long time the Turleys had got moving, pulling a little tail of dust and shrinking with distance until at last distance swallowed them. Trying to spot them, Evans couldn't be sure but what he saw was just a fleck in the eye. He wasn't extra religious, but he felt better because Weatherby had prayed for them, begging God to keep the Indians off, and the storms and the accidents, and please, God, guard Thy sheep.
   Just before, Weatherby had given Martin into God's keeping. Evans and Summers and Tadlock himself had dug the grave, dug it in silence while each man thought his own thoughts, and when it was ready they laid Martin by it, and Weatherby came and read out of the Book, taking Ephesians again. Not having a coffin or wood for one, they wrapped Martin in the blanket he laid on and lowered him and shoveled the sand in. Then Dick burned gunpowder over the grave and had them trail the stock across. That way, he said, wolves or Indians weren't likely to find the body. Neither, Evans figured, was anyone else, or anything. It was a lost grave as soon as left, and Martin's bones would lie in it till kingdom come, and buffalo would gallop over the spot and wolves trot across and wagon trains track it, and none would know that here lay what was left of a man -a dull-eyed man with bowed shoulders but with hankerings and troubles and rights of his own, who had set out for Oregon and got sick and cried out to Jesus and died.
   Evans thought with a little turn about shaving Martin. Rebecca said he ought to do that. A man should go to his grave looking decent, she said. And so he had scraped off the wiry whiskers, and they had dressed Martin up in the best clothes he had, which weren't much, though Martin made a nice-enough looking corpse, considering.
   The train had got under way then, Evans feeling low in his timid and small in his new place as captain, as if he couldn't come it, and Dick had ridden up and unforked his horse and walked along with him.
   He was glad for Dick's friendship. He leaned on Dick. He was stronger inside because of him. Maybe that showed he wasn't fit for captain. Maybe a captain ought to be stout enough to stand alone, wanting no help from anyone except the help hat would be expected of any pilot, like advice on crossings and routes and watch-outs for Indians. Well, that wasn't how he was cut. Never, anywhere, had he wanted to be boss. So he would lean on Dick, and when hard questions came up he would call the council together. They would have solid ideas. But there would still be times, he realized uncomfortably, when he would have to act. A captain had to be more than a leaner and a caller of meetings. He had to give confidence to people, and encouragement. He had to see, one way or another, that the train kept together and kept going. He had to lead, no matter if he didn't want to, else the train would fail. He wished he had just his own family to watch out for.
   Evans blew the dust out of his nose and brought a hand up and wiped his eyes. The valley was deeper here and narrower, and a traveler saw new kinds of plants, like the spiny clumps that Summers called Spanish bayonet and Weatherby said was Adam's needle. Flowers he didn't have a name for waved along the way, some coned and some daisied, colored purple and white and yellow. The women and children were forever picking posies if the day was fair. Here they would have to be careful. Rattlesnakes were getting thick. It would be just luck if someone didn't get bit. The thought troubled him. It added itself to his feeling of burden.