True Sisters (27 page)

“He does mean it. He’s a boy, and he’s hungry. God knows, he has reason to hate me.”

“You could talk to him. You must take him with you when you make your rounds, when you look for fuel, Thales. He is too much with us women, and he needs a man to guide him.”

“No,” Huldah said, coming up to the two and staring at the bloody head.

“Work will do Dick good. It will take his mind off his loss,” Louisa told her sister. “Besides, Thales is the head of our family. He must decide what’s best for us, all of us.”

“Thales is not my lord and master. I have lost one son. I will not lose another. I will not allow Thales to put him in danger.”

Thales studied her a moment before he replied, “You are his mother.” He turned and disappeared into the storm, Louisa watching him, her heart cold. She had loved him for his steadfastness, his unquestioning belief that he was chosen of the Lord, and now she was not sure she knew this man.

She dropped the ox head into the snow, knelt, and started to scrape away the hair with a knife. Huldah watched her for a moment, then she, too, sat down in the snow and, using a sharp rock, began helping her sister. “Do you blame Thales for Jimmy’s death?” Louisa asked.

Huldah shook her head; then, perhaps realizing Louisa could not see her, she replied, “I don’t know. It’s a muckle in my mind. Maybe it was only Jimmy’s time. But I won’t have him risk Dick.”

“Thales broods, you know. It’s changed him, Jimmy’s death and Father’s, and all the other deaths among our hundred. Thales blames himself.” Louisa stopped scraping to look at one of the ox’s dead eyes. She had never eaten a head before and was unsure about the eyes.

Huldah didn’t respond for a long time, and then she asked, “Do you think we should have come here, Louisa? Ought’nt we to have stayed at home?” She stopped scraping to look into her sister’s face.

“And not be saved?”

“We were saved at home. We could have stayed there. We didn’t have to go to Zion. Or we could have come later on, after Mother regained her health. We could have come in wagons instead of with handcarts. Father would be alive, and Jimmy. Or maybe we should have stayed in New York for a year. If it weren’t for Thales…” Her voice trailed off. Louisa would know what she meant.

In fact, Louisa had had such thoughts herself but had pushed them away until now. “Our life on earth is short. We must endure our sorrows so that we are worthy of joining the Saints in heaven.” Such pious words were unlikely to give Huldah comfort, so Louisa set down her knife and put her arms around her sister. “Oh, Huldah, I know how your heart breaks. I, too, have beseeched God for an explanation, have asked him why Jimmy had to drown. But He hasn’t answered me. We must believe in our hearts that He knows what’s best. That’s the only way we can live through this terrible time. If we lose our faith…” She could not continue the awful thought.

Huldah leaned against her sister and sobbed. “It is so hard, Louisa. Dick cries every night for his brother and from the cold. He blames himself. He says he should have refused to let Jimmy go into the water. But how could he go against Brother Thales, who accused the boys of being saucy, idle fellows? Grown men cannot stand up to him and tell him the error of his ways. How could a little boy do it? Dick says he wishes he could die, too.”

“Jimmy’s death wasn’t Dick’s fault.”

“I know, but he won’t own up to it.”

“Thales should talk to him. If Dick saw how Thales himself grieves and takes the blame for Jimmy’s death, I think he would feel better. Perhaps the two of them can help heal each other.”

“Would Thales do that? Would he admit to Dick that he’s responsible?” Huldah asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll ask him.”

“If he would say it to Dick, that would help, since despite what he says, Dick thinks Brother Thales is near to being a prophet and is not to blame for anything. That’s why Dick takes Jimmy’s death so hard. He lashes out at Thales, but in his heart, Dick believes he is at fault.”

“Thales is not a prophet. If he were, we should ask him to stop the snows,” Louisa said, smiling a little at her sister.

“There was a time when he would have believed himself capable of that, when he thought the heavens and the earth would obey him,” Huldah replied, looking at Louisa slyly, then picking up the stone and scraping the head.

“Now only God can do that.” Afraid she might have blasphemed, Louisa added, “When the Lord, who has brought us this far, believes we are chastened enough, the snow will cease.”

“Does Thales say that?”

“I say that.”

The two sisters began to scrape the ox head in earnest, and when they had finished, they cleaved the head with a knife and placed it in a kettle, which they set in the coals of their campfire. The head sent up the odor of wet hair and did not smell very good, but it was sustenance, and the sisters were grateful for it anyway. The two of them, along with their mother, took turns sitting with the pot, lest someone should come along and steal their supper. The wind was so fierce that some of the carts were blown over, their contents scattered in the snow. But Thales had placed rocks on either side of the wheels of the Tanner cart, and while it shook and shuddered and creaked, it remained upright.

Later, Thales returned and told them that he had met with Brother Martin and a few of the other leaders, who had discussed sending two or three of the strongest young men to the west to see if any rescuers had reached the Willie Company ahead of them. Thales had volunteered, but then, they had all decided it was better to wait. Men traveling in that whiteout were likely to freeze, and the company could not afford to lose any more. They had talked about what they would do if rescue didn’t come, had asked each other what would happen if they were forced to spend the winter in that spot. But there had been no answer. The men knew that remaining where they were meant starvation. The only thing they had agreed on was to pray. Hunting for the rescuers might have been the wiser course, Louisa thought. They could have left the halt and the lame to their prayers.

The light had faded by the time Thales returned to the cart. “I have never been so tired,” he confided to Louisa, throwing himself onto a blanket beside her. He closed his eyes and put his hands over them.

“Where’s Dick?” Huldah asked.

“He didn’t go with me,” Thales replied. “I asked his help, but he told me very rough he wanted nothing to do with me.”

“You should have looked after him,” Huldah said, her voice rising. “Where has he gone?”

“I’ll look for him,” Thales said, getting up slowly because he was exhausted. “Surely, he’s with his fellows.” He wrapped a scarf around his head, because he had lost his hat at the river crossing.

“He doesn’t play much with the boys. He was always with Jimmy,” Louisa said. “We’ll all look. Mother, you keep watch over the supper.” The two sisters tightened their shawls against the wind, and along with Thales, they started off, each in a different direction, calling for Dick and asking others if they had seen the boy. But most of the Saints were in misery so deep, they’d paid little attention to anyone who had passed by.

They searched throughout the camp, looking among the wagons and in the corral, thinking the boy might have huddled with the animals for warmth. The mother, Margaret, looked through the cart. Perhaps the boy had climbed inside and was under the clothing, sleeping. But he was not there.

They searched for an hour, a few Saints joining in the hunt—Emeline, the young girl who traveled with the Cooper party, and Andrew Buck, the Scottish weaver, who was accompanied by his wife and her sister on the journey. There were others, too, some as tired as Thales, but their hearts went out to a family searching for a boy. They might be starving and freezing, but they were Saints, and the sorrow of one was the sorrow of all.

Dick was not to be found, however. “I think maybe he has hidden himself or run off,” Thales said when the family gathered back at the cart.

“Run off? To where?” Louisa asked, alarmed to think the boy might have disappeared in the snow.

“He would not have done so. He would not leave me,” Huldah insisted, wringing her hands in her shawl. “Although he’s said he wants to be with Jimmy, he knows he’s all I have.”

Thales proposed they search beyond the camp, but Margaret insisted they eat first to keep up their strength. She lifted the lid of the pot, where bits of meat had fallen from the ghastly skull into a broth of melted snow, and handed around spoons, because the family had discarded their bowls at the last lightening of the load and now ate from a single pot. Louisa was too agitated to eat, however, and said, “I will search one more place.” The others looked at her with questions on their faces, but she would not tell them where she was going, because it was a place of no hope.

She went directly to the spot where the frozen bodies of those who died each day were lined up, awaiting burial. “I’m looking for a boy,” she told Old Absalom, who was standing guard over the bodies. She did not know if he was there because he was acquainted with someone who had died or because he feared wolves would make their way into the camp and desecrate the dead.

“Look you amongst ’em,” he said.

Louisa stopped beside each body, stooping down to look at the small ones, and that was where she found Dick. He must have fallen and frozen to death, or perhaps he willed himself to die, she thought. Someone had found him and carried him to the grave, where he lay in the pile of dead bodies, his arms by his sides. His eyes were closed, and it appeared he was sleeping. Louisa had not realized until she looked at him in death how Dick’s cheekbones stood out in his thin little face, how his eyes were sunken in dark circles. The arms sticking out from the coat were as thin as broomsticks. Louisa cried to think how the boy must have suffered, not just from his brother’s death but from the cold and hunger, that he must have been tortured by the thought of the freezing water closing over his brother. She knelt in the snow and tried to place the boy’s arms over his chest, but they were already stiff. She stayed there a long time, staring into the child’s frozen face until her toes began to tingle and it grew dark. Then she rose and made her way back to the cart.

Huldah and Thales stood up when she returned, neither asking her if she had found Dick, but both looking at her as if waiting for her to volunteer her answer. Finally, Thales asked, “Dick?”

“He is with Jimmy.”

The boy was buried in the morning, with prayers and singing and lamentations, Thales and the women standing beside the grave, tears running down their faces. The boy was not interred alone. His body lay beside that of his mother, Huldah. She had collapsed after learning that her remaining son was gone, and she would not get up. She passed away in the evening. She and her son were among the fourteen who died that day, some covered only with snow because the living had taken their clothes.

*   *   *

What dismal days we are living, Nannie Macintosh thought, wondering how much longer she could stand the cold. When she could force herself to her feet, she tottered among the handcarts, wrapped in her shawl and a blanket, but she was cold, and her teeth would not stop chattering. Nor could she stop shaking. Her feet pained her so that she was unable to walk far before she had to sit down. When the Saints were told to reduce the loads on their carts, she had discarded all but her warmest dress, but it was tattered and ripped, the hem caked with mud. Worse were her feet. She rubbed them in the snow and wrapped pieces of canvas around her boots, but her feet tingled with the snow and ice that came through the leather, because her boots were worn through and broken in places. When she removed them, she found that her stockings were bloody, and her toes seemed as frozen as the chips of ice that had pelted her at the last river crossing. She tore strips off her petticoat and wrapped them around her feet before putting her shoes back on, but that did little to keep out the cold.

Now, she sat with her feet to the little fire that Andrew had built, but she did not worry about herself. Instead, her thoughts were of her sister. Ella had turned sickly, and Nannie and Andrew were afraid that she would lose the baby. So Andrew had wrapped his coat around his wife, saying he wasn’t cold, and had gone off in search of God knows what that would help Ella—fuel, food, blankets, none of which could be had. Or perhaps, he was at one of the prayer meetings. Nannie had stopped attending them because she felt preached to death, and kneeling on the ice, she told her sister, “hurt my knee bones.” She thought about the things she had loved at home—the lovely teas, the mist on the hillsides, the flowers. Oh, she loved the growing things—the heather, the violets, the yellow cinquefoil and buttercups. She would plant them around her cottage in the valley—if she had a cottage. Perhaps Levi, if he were the one she married, would expect her to live in a house with Patricia. Nannie thought that Patricia already suspected Levi’s intentions, because she had stepped in front of Nannie in the provision line and told her, “I come first, madam.” Living in the same house with the first wife would not be easy, Nannie knew, but the decision would be Levi’s, and she would have to abide by it. Levi wasn’t as thoughtful as Andrew. But wherever she lived, she would insist on flowers.

During the weeks they had pushed the handcart, Andrew had surprised Nannie. She loved her brother-in-law because, after all, he was her sister’s husband and he had insisted that she come to America with them. But that didn’t mean that Nannie had ever believed Andrew would amount to much. In fact, in the beginning, she had worried that after years of working in a textile mill, he wouldn’t be able to maneuver the handcart across the prairie. Earlier in the journey, he had even had a sick spell that all but did him in. But Andrew had strength that Nannie had never suspected. And now, as she and Ella grew weaker, Andrew became stronger, insisting that his wife ride on top of the cart when she was exhausted, telling Nannie he could pull the cart without her help when she, too, faltered. Nannie had seen him slip part of his portion of the evening meal onto Ella’s plate and, on occasion, her own, and he had even shared with other Saints who were starving.