The Way West (18 page)

   "You think funny things, Hig."
   "Who don't, ma'am?"
   Who didn't? Was this long uneasiness of hers any odder, was it as sensible as Hig's whimsies? "Anyhow, we're glad you're with us, Hig."
   "Same here. Now, Tod, there's a dandy fort for you. Keep them redskins scared away. Hear? I got a job of tire fixin' to do."
   He drew his long legs under him and got to his feet and ambled off, a scarecrow, Judith thought, a scarecrow with a mind.
   She picked up the basket. "You play fort, Tod, while I finish, and then we can wade." She went to the rope she had lined between two trees and put the basket down and began shaking out and hanging up the wash.
   A scarecrow with a mind. A personality behind a face like a forgotten apple. And more than that. A spirit that kept itself good-natured and whimsical, that found fun in a fiddle and rewards in the moment, undaunted by hardship or travel or distance or the dark disasters the brooding mind made up.
   She would be more like that, she told herself. She would cast off anxiety. She would meet trouble when it came, and not before. She would be cheerful and strong and so make a better wife and mother. She made herself hum a snatch of song and felt a kind of fierce cheer and a kind of fierce strength rising in her, put there by her will. She let herself enjoy it, let herself exult with it while she hung the clothes, her mind passive, knowing only the high comfort of courage. She hung the last garment and turned to speak, and saw that Tod was gone.
 
 

He didn't mean to run away. He just meant to move around a little, being so tired of forts and mud pies and staying in one place that he couldn't hold still any longer. He walked out from the washtub, stepping through a patch of dry grass, and a great, gray grasshopper with blind eyes looked at him and jumped up with a flutter of red wings and a whirring clatter. He ran after it, watching its crazy flight in the breeze, and saw it settle. He came up with his hand lifted and cupped, a little fearful of clapping it down. The eyes stared and the legs hitched and the stone-gray body rose, turning red again, and clattered ahead.
   He stooped and grabbed two finger stones, thinking he would kill the grasshopper with them, and set off after it, running toward a grass clump where it had lighted. It winged up just as he thought he had lost it, and he ran again, holding a rock in each hand. He threw and missed, and the grasshopper rose and he followed, and it rose and he followed, hot and eager with the chase of it.
   After a while he did lose it. It wouldn't rise from the dust or the curled grass where he thought it had landed though he scuffed the place and scuffed it again, feeling let down because fun should have been taken from him so soon.
   Giving up, he looked around and saw that Mother was out of sight, over a swell of land, beyond a wagon itself half hidden by the swell. He couldn't see any person, not a man or a woman, and not even any children, though their shouting voices came to him.
   A sudden emptiness came on him, and he started trotting back, wanting the safe arms of his mother and the soft bosom and the mouth scolding while it kissed him.
   Then he heard the grasshopper again, the nervous, whirring rattle of it coming from somewhere in a ragged pile of rocks. The known sound reassured him. He stopped trotting and angled off toward the pile.
   Low on the ground, hard to see against the broken stone, among the sun-browned grasses, a little-man's face looked at him, pinch-mouthed and hard-eyed, with two holes for a nose. A tongue licked red and quick from the tight mouth.
   Little-man's face! Snake's face! Rattlesnake's face, the coil behind showing dusty on the dusty rock, the tail blurred with shakingl
   In the shock of first knowing, he couldn't run. He stood there with fear washing in him while his eyes blurred with the blurring tail and lost the face in the fast, red licking of the tongue.
   "Toddie! Oh, Toddie!"
   He swung around and started off and felt the bite of needles in his leg and the drag of the coil before it pulled free.
 
 

   Lije Evans pulled up when he and the others had rounded Independence Rock and could get a good view of the camp. "There she is, safe as sassafras."
   Dick Summers and Charles Fairman had reined in, too, and sat easy in their saddles, gazing down the tilting plain to the covered wagons a half mile away. Back of them the four meatladen pack horses nosed up and melted into the positions of rest. "We got a fair load on them critters," Evans said, sizing up the two that trailed him.
   "We been fools for luck-so far."
   Fairman asked, "What do you mean, Dick? So little sickness?"
   "Injuns. We ain't hardly seed an Injun."
   "Plenty of time yet," Evans said.
   "Acrost the mountains is friendlies."
   "But no buffalo."
   "Few. Ought to dry meat tomorrow or next day, Lije, I'm thinkin'. Seemed today like the buffler'd run out soon now." While he spoke, Dick kept his gaze on the camp.
   Evans glanced at it and then up at the sun and said, "We come back in good time to hear Tadlock on independence, like we promised." Thinking about Tadlock, he was a little soured -Tadlock, who kept saying they ought to have a Fourth of July speech at the rock and then had acted as if he didn't want to make it when they asked him why he didn't speak himself then. Said that wasn't the idea, but all right, then, he would, since they asked. He was a man so hungry for importance he kept chasing it away.
   Tadlock went out of Evans' mind when he glanced at Dick again. "What's wrong?" He followed Dick's gaze to the camp. The wagons sat safe in the sun and around them the tents; eastward the herd straggled along the river, where he could make out a guard or two.
   "Maybe nothin'," Dick answered. "Don't see nobody this side of the corral."
   "They're by the river."
   Dick grunted, and Evans found himself wondering, as he had before, at the way of Dick, who could look off and see things that others wouldn't and add them up to a solid guess.
   Dick said, "There's doin's on yonder side."
   Squinting, Evans now and then caught sight of figures through the gaps that the cluster of tents and wagons left. "Probably Weatherby's exhortin'."
   "Could be."
   "My wagons are over there." The shadow of misgiving showed on Fairman's face.
   "Let's git on," Dick said, and jerked the lead rope on his two-horse pack string.
   Evans jerked, too, and kicked his mount and felt his right arm strain at the socket as the near horse pulled back. He reckoned he'd never learn to handle a rope and a rifle and reins as Dick could. "Getup!" The horses came to a trot and then to a slow lope, the meat thunking against their sides as they hit the end of stride. Fairman, without a pack string to pull, had gone galloping ahead.
   Dick was right, Evans thought, as they pulled to a stop on i he near side of the ring where Fairman's horse stood hip-shot and untied. There wasn't a soul here. Everybody was yonder. They slid off and tied up to wheel spokes and stepped over a wagon tongue and crossed the enclosure now empty of stock and stepped over another tongue and came to the company grouped outside Fairman's tent.
   Evans grabbed the first man he came to. It happened to be, Hig. "What is it?"
Hig's squeezed face seemed squeezed more than ever. The words came thin from his mouth. "The boy got snake-bit."
   "Tod!"
   "Rattlesnake-bit."
   "For God's sake! When?"
   "Been a spell back. Middle of the morning."
   "Dick!"
   Hig's voice wasn't much more than a whisper. "Looks like a goner."
   "Dick! You hear!"
   "I heerd," Dick said and shook his head.
   They pushed on to the flap of the tent where Brother Weatherby stood old and stooped. Evans brushed by him and bent to clear the canvas and went in. He saw Rebecca first, sitting on the ground by the side of the bed, a pan in her hand. She didn't speak, except with her eyes.
   Evans said, "I-we just heerd."
   The boy lay in his bed on the ground, covered so that nothing could be seen of him except his shape under the blanket and, at the head of the bed, his face pale on the fresh pillow and his eyes half closed.
   Evans' gaze ran from the boy to Judith Fairman, who sat across from Rebecca, holding the boy's hand in both of hers. "How is he?"
   Fairman swung around. He had been kneeling by his wife's side, staring at Tod as if a spell had been put on him. "In the name of God, do we just have to stand and gawk?"
   The boy stirred weakly and murmured something that his mother bent to hear. She took a towel from a little pile by her side and touched his forehead and mouth with it. "Do you want another drink, Toddie? Want another drink?"
   Evans called, "Dick!"
   Dick had stayed just outside. He crowded into the tent and nodded and rested his eyes on the bed.
   "We'd best look, too, Charlie," Evans said.
   "He was cold. He told his mother he was cold," Fairman said, low-voiced, as if asking pardon for being impolite before. He laid back the cover, watching their faces while they looked.
   Inside himself Evans shrank from what he saw -the leg swollen double-size clear to the thigh already, and the skin drawn bursting tight and the shank lumped and polkadotted with the black and blue of poisoned blood.
   Fairman took the heel of the foot, gently, and, while the boy whimpered, turned it so as to show the bite. Someone had cut at the fang marks, and the cuts leaked a black ooze that had washed little rivers in a black dust.
   All of them, Evans thought, were silenced by the evil of the thing, until Rebecca said, "Mr. Byrd lanced him and rubbed salt and gunpowder in. It was all we knew to do."
   "Don't you know something?" Judith Fairman's voice wasn't much more than a whisper. She hadn't spoken before, and now he looked at her face, and there was such trouble there and so much of prayer in her voice that he couldn't say the truth. While he hunted for a lie, Dick asked, "Did you suck him?"
   She shook her head slowly, as if under a gathering load of guilt for not thinking of sucking.
Evans couldn't look at her longer. He couldn't stand to see hope trembling against despair, and her so young and comely and deserving. His eyes went to Rebecca, sitting silent, giving in silence of her strength. It came to him that women suffered deeper and endured longer and understood better than any inan. In grief and death men were only children, as he was himself, and had to lean on the motherness of the Rebeccas of the world.
   The boy moved, and his half-shut eyes flickered, and a spasm wrenched him, ending in vomit that Rebecca tried to catch in tier pan. Judith leaned over and wiped him with a towel.
   The boy cried weakly, "It hurts, Mother."
   "Plainest words he's spoke," Evans said, trying to find the tone of hope.
   "I know, dear. I know. Do you want a drink?" Judith's face didn't cry; nothing but the pale-blue eyes cried, putting the shine of tears on her cheeks.
   The boy didn't answer. He sank back, and his lids lowered, and Evans feared he saw the blue of death under the eyes and on the temples. He listened for Tod's breathing.
   Fairman cried out again, as if they were all at fault, "Do we just stand and wait?"
   "Easy, Charlie," Evans said. He walked stooping to the door of the tent. "One of you women bile some milk, will you?" Then, to the ones in the tent, "Keep 'im quiet as can be. Dick!"
   Brother Weatherby still stood at the entrance. "I'll be around if you need me."
   "Obliged. Come on, Dick."
   He led Dick over to the side, away from the people who had divided into knots and were talking in the tones of the sickroom.
   Dick said, his voice hard with helplessness, "There ain't a thing to do, goddam it, Lije."
   "Except to make Judith think every God's thing was done." Dick studied a minute and answered softer. "You're a good hoss, Lije. There's a root the Sioux swear by, though it's no account. I'll dig some."
   As Evans started back through the waiting ones, he felt a hand on his arm and heard the pipe of Mrs. McBee. "If we could git a warty toad, now, that 'ud be the thing."
   "Toad?"
   "You lay it on the bite, and if'n it lives, it draws the pizen out, and if it dies, you git another."
   "Go find a toad," he said, and pulled loose from the claw of her hand and re-entered the tent. "Dick's gone for wild medicine, an' he 'lows suckin' still might help."
   Fairman's eyes met his. Fairman said, "All right," and laid the blanket back.
   "I'll do it, Charlie."
   "He's my boy." Fairman bent his head.
The boy didn't move as the foot was turned. He lay there quiet, he and his little leg and the big, black leg that would kill him.
   "We'll put on a root-and-milk poultice," Evans said. "That might fotch it."
Judith was stroking the hand she had brought back into hers. "He hasn't had any fun," she said, not to anyone, as if speaking a faraway wish for a new chance with him. The tears kept spilling from her eyes and sliding down the uncrying face. "He's been sick so much."
   Fairman raised his head and spit and bent it again.
   Judith went on as if she was all alone: "I should have played with him this morning. I should have known how tired he was of doing nothing."
   "Don't fault yourself, Judie," Rebecca asked. "Please don't fault yourself any more. You ain't to blame."
   Evans wished Judith would break down, wished she would begin to whoop and holler and take on as some women did and so ease herself and all the rest of them.
   Dick came in with a kettle of hot milk in one hand and some straggly roots in the other and sat down at the door of the tent and put a root in his mouth. When he had chewed it up, he spit it into his hand and took another bite. "All right, Charlie."
   Fairman brought his head up and cleared his mouth. Some grains of powder showed around it. "What is it?"
   "A root the Sioux use." Dick moved up with his handful of chewings and plastered it on.
   "Got a rag?" Evans asked.
   Judith took a towel from the pile by her side and leaned across to hand it to him. He went to the kettle and dipped the towel in the hot milk and folded it and came back and laid it over. Fairman spread the blanket again.
   "Would whisky help?" Fairman asked.
   Dick just shook his head while he sat cross-legged, his face showing nothing but the hard patience to wait.
   Evans let himself down and put his hand to his neck that was stiff with stooping, and for what seemed a long time they sat there, out of talk, while Dick chewed fresh root and Evans dipped the rag in the heated milk that Mrs. Mack kept bringing back. From outside came the wordless murmur of voices.
   Judith's far-off voice picked up by and by. "He was what we were going to Oregon for."
   Fairman broke in sharply, "Was!"
   "I mean is, Charles. Is."
   Evans stared at his hands, and then Judith cried out, cried the breaking cry that he had been wishing for and couldn't stand now, and he saw the thick and sickly matter bleeding from the boy's closed lids and knew that he was dying.
   He scrambled up and ducked outside, spitting "Bad," to all the questions asked him, and found Brother Weatherby and asked him to come. Sometimes he felt like thanking God for preachers.