The Way West (2 page)

   "How so?"
   "Tradin' nothin' for nothin', I got shet of the nutmegs. It always hurt my pride, lookin' at 'em."
Evans heard the door squeaking open and turned around and saw Tadlock coming in, and with him two other men, one looking to be not much more than a boy.
   Hitchcock's slow gaze went to Tadlock. "I know it ain't whisky you're wantin'," he said, as if a man that didn't drink was queer beyond knowing, maybe remembering when everybody drank and even a preacher would take a swig or two so as to be able to talk some extra fire into hell.
   "Right," said Tadlock. "Evans, shake hands with Curtis Mack. And Charles Fairman. And this is Henry McBee."
   They shook hands all around. Charles Fairman was the young-looking man. He had a good face, with dark eyes and a high forehead and a seriousness about him that meant he had seen more years or trouble than a man might think at first.
   Curtis Mack was older, and different. Evans guessed him to be maybe thirty-five. He was the kind of man who seemed not to give all his attention to what was going on; part of him was somewhere else, looking backward or forward, fretting, maybe, over what he had to do.
   "Mack and Fairman have joined my company," Tadlock said. "Hurrah for Oregon!" It was McBee speaking up.
   "With my men from Illinois," Tadlock said as if he owned them, "we have close to the makings of a train. We don't want too big a company. We want to travel light and fast."
   "How many of ye?" McBee asked Fairman.
   The young man answered, "My wife and boy."
   "Married, eh?"
   Fairman nodded.
   "I was just thinkin'. Got a girl comin' seventeen myself, her and my old woman and five besides."
   Evans wanted another drink, now that he had had a couple. Becky might scold him a little -but still he didn't drink very often or very much. He asked, "How about a drink?"
   Before anybody else could answer, McBee said, "I do believe I will."
   The others said they would, too, all except Tadlock.
   Fairman raised his glass and said, "Here's to a place where there's no fever."
   "'Y God, yes," answered McBee. "And to soil rich as anything. Plant a nail and it'll come up a spike. I heerd you don't never have to put up hay, the grass is that good, winter and all. And lambs come twice a year. Just set by and let the grass grow and the critters birth and get fat. That's my idee of farmin'."
   "Seems to me," said Evans, "that you all are ahead of yourselves. Be a month and more before you can start."
   The man, Mack, nodded. "First come, best served. Best land, best damsites, best business locations." He fell silent and stood looking off, his forehead wrinkled, as if he saw Oregon and the land and the sites and the locations he had spoken of. The thumb of the hand at his side kept playing along the fingers.
   "We've got plenty of work to do before we can start," Tadlock said.
   The young Fairman bobbed his head. "The more I think of it, the more I think I'm doing right. No fever. New land. New chances."
   "A new way of things," Evans said, reading what was in Fairman's mind and putting it all together, and Fairman gave him a little smile and nodded again.
   "Of course you're doing right," Tadlock spoke up. "You ought to join, Evans, right now."
   "What's the matter with Missouri?" It was Hitchcock asking, as he wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. The red eyeballs went from one to another of them for an answer.
Then his gaze slid over to the door, and Evans, following it, .aw the door opening and a girl coming in. She stepped in and held the door half shut behind her and stood uncertain, like a bird about to fly, and it grew on Evans that she was such a girl as a man wouldn't see every day. The curves of her gave shape to the shapeless linsey-woolsey she wore. The face above the dress was so quick and aware it almost hurt to look. The face was pale, and the planes of the cheeks long and smooth, and the mouth full as a knowing man wanted a mouth to be. The eyes were big and dark and darkly shining, except that shining wasn't exactly the word for them. Glowing, maybe, was more like it.
   "Pa," she said, standing there in bare feet, the lines of her young breasts showing through her sack of a dress. McBee looked up then. "Well?"
   "Ma wants you should come to the wagon."
   McBee's mouth worked in the scrubby beard. "You tell your ma I'm busy."
   "She said, please, to come."
   One small foot came tip and slid down the instep of the other, and Evans guessed her ma had said not to come back without her pa.
   "You tell her I'll come when I can, and not before. Hear?"
   Evans brought. his gaze away from her and looked at McBee and then at the rest and caught Mack unguarded, his eyes busy, his face marked with what might be hunger, as if for a minute, and maybe for no more than that, he had let his thoughts run away with him. The others made out not to notice anything much, maybe feeling small and out of place as Evans did himself.
   "You git on!" McBee said.
   The girl turned then, slowly, and went through the door and closed it and was lost to sight.
   "The damn women!" McBee said. "Always wantin' you for something. That's my girl, Mercy." He reached in his pocket for a twist of tobacco.
   They drank quietly for a minute, and then Tadlock changed the subject that was in their minds. "We haven't decided on a pilot. We have to find a good pilot."
   "There are some who say they are," Mack said, taking his eyes from the door. "Adams for one. Or Meek."
   McBee tongued his chew to one side. "Goddam it, I bet they couldn't follow a turnpike."
   Tadlock spoke again. "Adams hasn't been beyond Fort Laramie. Any fool can get to Laramie. It's the country beyond that counts."
   "What about Meek?" Mack asked.
   "I understand he's already dickering, he and Adams both."
   Tadlock turned to Evans. "You know a good pilot?"
   "I don't guess so."
   "You talk as if you might."
   "I was just thinkin'."
   Tadlock waited.
   "I reckon I do know one. Gettin' him is the question."
   "Who is it?"
   "I don't know as I ought to say before I can talk to him myself. Maybe he wouldn't appreciate my sayin'."
   "Why would he object?"
   Mack ordered drinks again, motioning to Hitchcock.
   "I don't know. Maybe he wouldn't."
   "How could it hurt to tell? It doesn't commit him -and we've got to know if we're going to put the proposition. There ought to be a nice piece of money in it for him. Not as much as with a big company, but the worry and work would be less."
   "Well," Evans said, taking the refilled glass, "I reckon you're right. He sure-God can say no for himself. It's old Dick Summers. He's been everywhere, trappin' beaver and fightin' Indians and all. He could guide us blindfolded."
   "Where does he live?"
   "Neighbor to me."
   "Is there a chance we could get him?"
   "Hard tellin'. His woman's poorly."
   "But you're sure he'd do?" Tadlock went on. "We can't have some worn-out grandpa who'll show up with a Harpers Ferry musket and a jug of whisky."
   "I 'xpect," said Evans slowly, looking Tadlock in the face, that Dick Summers is just about the best man I ever met up with."
   "Would you go with us to see him?"
   "Sometime. Tomorry or next day."
   "Good. Fine. Meantime we'll figure on the pay." Tadlock figured on it in his head right then, without saying what it might add up to. When he spoke it was to ask Evans: "Now has that mind of yours made itself up?"
   "I ain't sure."
   "We'll have a full party before long."
   Mack asked, "Why would you want to stay here when you can go to Oregon? As I said, first come, best served."
   Evans didn't have an answer.
   "I hope you can go," young Fairman said as if he meant it.
   "Look here," said Tadlock, counting off on his fingers as he made his points. "You know the Willamette valley is fertile, pretty, too, beyond anything we know here."
   "That's what they tell me."
   "It's rich. It is easy to get to by water, by river and ocean."
   Evans agreed.
   "That Iowa committee -two years ago, wasn't it?- it knew what it was talking about."
   "How's that?"
   "Take climate, it said, or water power or health or timber or soil or convenience to markets, Oregon beat them all."
   "That was before they got there."
   "You haven't heard a different story since?"
   "Don't know as I have."
   "Look," Tadlock said, using his hands like a man who stood for office. "There's a better reason yet, to my mind." He paused to let the words sink in. "Is it our country or England's? You want it to be British?"
   "Hitchcock does, but not me."
   "Well, what's going to decide it? People, that's what. People like you and me. if we've got gumption enough to settle there."
   The blood had climbed to Tadlock's face. In his temple Evans could see a vein stand out. His words had a ring to them. In spite of himself, Evans was moved.
   "They say fifty-four forty or fight," Tadlock went on. "By God, we won't have to fight if enough of us are on the ground!" He let his voice fall. "It would be a proud thing, Evans, for you and your children and their young ones, too, saying Pa or Grandpa helped win the country. Or do you want to sit in a chair and let others make history?"
   Tadlock pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. "That's all -except to say again we want you."
   "What do you think?" Mack asked.
   Evans read in Fairman's face the hope he would say yes.
   "You're bunchin' up on me." Evans looked from face to face, and saw them all solemn and waiting, even McBee's. Almost before he knew it, he said, "Tell you what. If Dick Summers goes, I will."
   "Good enough."
   McBee said, " 'Y God, shake hands."
   They had another drink -all except Tadlock and Fairman and then Evans went and untied his mule. Riding home, he told himself he had let the whisky talk, but still he wondered what he would do and still didn't wonder, either. It was as if the course had been set all along, and he had been playing that it wasn't, acting like he could say yes or no. He would go if Dick wwent, and, maybe, by hell, he would anyway. Free men, brave men in a great, new nation. A new way of things. Soil good. Hunting good. Climate good. No fever. Hurrah for Oregon! He wouldn't figure too much why it was he went. The head got tired, figuring. He would just go because he wanted to, for all sorts of reasons. He would go if he felt the same as now after the fire died in him.
   He unsaddled the mule and turned it loose and made for the cabin, remembering of a sudden that he hadn't eaten and was hungry. The sun was sliding down the western sky, showing through the tail of a cloud. Likely it would be fair tomorrow and he would have to dig and grub and split and bend and lift and jolt as if his life depended on it, which it did. A man didn't make history, staying close to home.
   Old Rock welcomed him, as if asking what was up, and he opened the door and saw Rebecca stooping at the fireplace. "Get your breeches on, Becky," he called out. "We're goin' to Oregon
 

AFTER EVANS had left the store, the others drifted away. Tadlock announced he had business to attend to at the Noland House, and McBee guessed he'd go see what it was his woman wanted, and Mack excused himself by saying he was figuring on buying some cattle.
   As they walked out the door, leaving Hitchcock staring moodily after them, Tadlock halted and watched Evans riding away on his mule. "There's a man I'd like to have in my company," he said.
It was what Charles Fairman had been thinking. He liked this big man with the easygoing manner, liked the signs of good humor in the broad and fleshy face, the indications of physical competence in the stout hands and big frame. He was, Fairman thought a little enviously, what a man should be who contemplated a long, hard, dangerous trip. He gave promise of being a better companion than Tadlock, who would be officious, or than Mack, who would be difficult to know, or than McBee, the poor white.
   "My bet is that Evans will come along, after that sermon you preached him," Mack said to Tadlock.
   "It was the God's truth."
   "God's truth on Tadlock's tongue," Mack said, smiling, and settled his hat on his head and began to walk away.
   Fairman signaled a goodbye and set off for what he called home. It was two rooms in a ramshackle house, but better, at that, than a tent. He doubted that Tod could have survived in a tent, the way the fever raged in him. He had to have shelter and care- but more than anything he had to have the high, dry air, such as people said you found in the valley of the high Platte, in the mountains, in Oregon, where there was no fever at all.
   Looking around him, seeing the cabins breasting into the mud, feeling the wetness in the air in spite of the high-riding sun, Fairman wished they could start at once. Independence was as miasmal as the lowlands of Kentucky. Sometimes he wondered why his father had left Virginia, to travel through the Gap to the canebrakes of Kentucky and, by stages, to the Ohio. Virginia was healthier country. At any rate his father had admitted as much in his later days, when the push of adventure had died in him and old, remembered things filled his mind. People didn't yawn and stretch there, he said, and stand slumped as if they couldn't move.
   As Fairman approached, the woman of the house opened the door and with a split broom fanned out the dirt she had swept tip. As always, the tip of her nose was red from cooking. "Oh, it's you," she said, stopping her sweeping and letting her arms hang loose from her hold on the broom handle. "They was a man here." Her glance shifted from him to a sleepy sow that had lifted herself from the mud of the yard and stood grunting, her small eyes winking with dull alarm. The woman flourished the broom. "Git, you! I declare!" The sow gave a quick, outraged grunt and lumbered away.
   Fairman asked, "What?"
   "They was a man here. You been saying you wanted another man."
   "Oh! That's good. You mean to go with us?"
   "He said he would -for the ride and victuals."
   "Did he talk to my wife?"
   "Wouldn't do it. Said God knows women have aplenty to say, but no say-so." The red nose sniffed.
   "I see. Where did he go?"
   "He traipsed off somewheres. Said he'd be back."
   Fairman said, "I see," again, hoping the man would be back. With two wagons and the cattle he expected to trail, he would need two men at least. He had one, a quiet hand who chewed tobacco all day long and had spent his life working with horses and mules and oxen.
   Fairman stepped into the house.
   "He had a pinched-up face," the woman said over her shoulder.
    He walked through a room and opened the door to the quarters he and his family occupied. He looked at Judith, letting his face ask how Tod was. She smiled and called out, "Toddie, your father's home." Tod came out of the kitchen, riding a stick for a horse.
   "Pretty frisky, aren't you, boy?"
   Tod unstraddled the stick. "I'm going to ride him to Oregon."
   "That's a fine horse," Fairman said, touching the stick. "For a five-year-old you're a good picker."
Judith smiled at the boy and put her hand on his head. "He'll be ready. He's getting to be a stout boy."
   "This is still fever country," Fairman cautioned her. "Not like Paducah."
   "Maybe not. He does look better." Fairman told himself it was true that Tod did. The boy was still thin as a twig and fraillooking, like a young bird, but his eyes were clear now and his color better.
   "I'm fine," Tod said. "Why don't we go now? Why do we have to wait, Pa?"
   "We'll be going soon. And remember to say Father."
   Judith barely shook her head as if to say not to bother over trifles.
   "I don't like `Pa,' " he answered, knowing she was right.
   "We've eaten," Judith told him. "You were so long. There's cold chicken and corn bread and milk on the table."
   He went into the kitchen, or the room that passed for a kitchen, and sat down at the hand-hewn table. "Judie," he said while he tore a thigh and drumstick apart, "we're doing right." She and Tod had followed him in.
   "Oh?"
   "Not the fever alone. The whole thing."
   "I hope so."
   "It makes a man feel like something, this -this big adventure. We'll have a good company. I've been talking to some of the men."
   He let his thoughts move ahead while he munched on the chicken, seeing the farm they would have in Oregon and the wheat waving yellow and the great ships riding the Columbia for their produce. He saw Tod strong at last, with healthy flesh covering the thin bones, saw him growing up with the country, saw him growing important with it. He felt almost gay, free of the quick irritation that forebodings aroused in him.
   "It'll be rough at first," he said, "but we can stand a little roughness all right. Eh, boy?"
   Tod, astride the stick again, called, "Whoa!"
   "There's just one thing," Fairman said while he studied Judith. "I almost wish I had tried bringing a slave along."
   "Don't worry about me. I'll get along."
   "All right," he said, making his tone hearty, but his mind had slipped back to Kentucky, to country where the Tennessee and the Cumberland joined the Ohio, and one lived in a house, not a cabin, and colored folk did the drudge work, and life, except for sickness, seemed now to have flowed smoothly. For a minute he felt again a great misgiving, doubting that even Judith could hear the hardships before them. She was not a strong girl, but, God knew, not languid, either. She worked to the limit of her strength, so that night often found her near collapse, and it seemed to him then that the flesh of her cheeks and lips was almost transparent, and he would look into the gentle, paleblue eyes with quick and secret alarm.
   She often fell victim to fever, too, and went through the agonies of chill and heat, the induced vomitings, the calomel ind blisterings and quinine. It was for her sake, if not as much as for Tod's, that he had sold his small plantation and placed his few slaves and taken the steamboat for St. Louis and then for Independence. A few wretched Kaws had been aboard and, for a pint of whisky offered them by some travelers themselves half drunk, had sung a rusty, discordant Indian song. The boat was ,I i rty, the men dirty, the Indian beggars verminous. Along the ,ho>res the bare trees crowded, straining up for room and air, their  lower trunks lost in a tangle of vine and bush. It seemed to Fairman he could see sickness there, could see fever breeding in the breathless overgrowth. It ran with the water under the boat, too, with the yellow, sickly flow of the Ohio and the Mississippi. He felt like turning back.
   But he was right, he told himself now. He knew himself to be a not very practical man, but he had to be right about Oregon. They knew -he and Judie- that Tod couldn't live in the low river country. Sickness lay deep and malignant in him, easing away only to return as regularly as time, shaking him to pieces with chills, wasting his flesh with fever. If ever he recovered from one illness -which was to be doubted- he promptly caught another. And so Fairman and Judith had come to live in dread, mostly unspoken but real as a burden on the back. He had lain at night and thought about the boy in health, with his hair like tow and his skin touched with the color of gold, and then, in spite of himself, he had turned about and dreamed about fever and seen the boy withering under it -the dread realizing itself- and had awakened in a sweat, his heart thumping in his chest, and had sat up in bed and tried to shake the picture from his head.
   Tod asked, "What you thinking about?"
   "I thought I might go out and look at some mules."
   "Isn't it still early?" Judith said.
   "Prices probably will go up later, when the real crowd gets here."
   "Tod asked, "Can I go, Pa -I mean Father." Fairman looked at his wife.
   "I don't think it will hurt him, if you're not gone too long. It's nice out."
   "I guess you can, Son," Fairman answered, rising.
   Tod came and took his hand, and they left the house and walked down toward a yard that Fairman had noted before, a pole yard built to keep sale stock in.
   It was a good day, the kind of day that made a man want to start at once, while the sun was friendly and the spring wind down to a breath. Only the mud argued for waiting. No matter how wide-tired, wagons would have a hard time in the mud. Fainnan picked his way through it, guiding Toddie before him.
   He was having his own wagons retired with three-inch iron, bolted on, though most tires were two inches wide and some even less. He had bought two substantial wagons, made of wellseasoned wood, with falling tongues and well-steeled skeins. He had contracted for boxes for their effects, to be built of even height so as to provide a flat surface to lie on if need be. He had laid in a good supply of horse gear and gathered some simple tools and had bought a good rifle and a pistol and a shotgun for fowling. He had purchased a sheet-iron stove with a boiler, and aDutch oven and skillet and plates and cups of tin, since queen's ware was heavy and likely to break. He had a tent, two churns -one for sour and one for sweet milk- and two plow molds and a supply of rope for tethering animals.
   The list of equipment, he estimated as he counted the items off, was almost complete. Now he had to think about supplies flour, meal, bacon, sugar, salt, dried stuff, coffee, rice, maybe a little keg of vinegar. And books, especially schoolbooks. Books would be scarce in a new country. With two wagons he could transport more than some travelers -a cherry chest that Judie liked, the best of her dishes, buried in the flour, quilts, extra clothes, dress shoes, jams and jellies. Whimwhams they would be called by men who swore to travel light.
   More important was the question of stock -oxen for the wagons, seven or eight yokes of them at least; mules to ride, milk cows and cattle to drive. Should he try to take sheep, chickens, geese? One got all manner of advice. He wished he could be sure.
   And medicines. He mustn't forget an ample supply of medicines.
   He had arrived at that subject when a voice called from behind him. "You lookin' for a man to go west? Be you Mr. Fairman?"
   He turned and said "Yes" and waited, seeing a long splinter of a man in a hickory shirt and high-hung homespun breeches and an old piece of felt hat.
   Name's Hig," the figure announced. "Or that's what they call me. It's bobtail for Higgins. I been on your trail, as maybe the lady told you."
   The lady had been right when she said his face was pinched up. He wasn't old but had lost his teeth, so that the mouth turned in and the small jaw sat snug under a thin nose. The eyes seemed crowded, too, under the close line of brow, but the forehead, Fairman noted, was good, as if nature had tried to make up for the stinginess below.
   "I hanker to go," the man said. "Gimme a place to lay my head, any old place, and somep'n to feed on, and I'm your gooseberry. How-de-do there, boy."
   "You're experienced?"
   "A man don't live to my age without learnin'."
   "I mean you can handle stock, drive a wagon, lend a hand when needed?"
   "Sure, mister. Maybe I look green like a gourd, but I'm ripe inside."
   "What's your purpose in going?"
   "I dunno. Jest to get where I ain't."
   It was, Fairman reflected, as good a reason as most. "How old are you?"
   "That I wouldn't know. As my pap used to say, too young to die and too old to suck."
   A grin appeared in the pinched face, a thin but merry grin which might have been wider had there been room for it.
   "The man I take mustn't be afraid of work."
   "Can't say I love it, but I done enough to find it won't kill you. Same time, I might as well tell you, I like fun. I got me a fiddle." The slitted eyes questioned Fairman. "You'll stand in need of fun, time you eat a bushel of dust and your critters get sore-footed and your woman's askin' how was it you lost your mind and headed for Oregon."
   "Where you from?"
   "Now or then?"
   "Well-both."
   "Now, from Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Louisville, and p'ints between. Then, from right here in Missouri."
   "This is serious business. You'd have to stay sober."
   "That ain't hard. Not for me. Not to say I ain't been drunk, neither."
   Fairman debated, looking the man over, from the good forehead to the squeezed face to the spare figure to the feet shod in old peg boots. He did need another man.
   While he debated, Hig said, "I'm a fixer, too. Used to be a pewter tinker. I can doctor sick rifle-guns and busted wheels and all. You'll see." He waited, and when Fairman's answer didn't come at once he thrust his hands out. "Lookit! These here paws didn't get that way lyin' folded in my lap. I'm skinny but strong, like a razorback hog. I ain't askin' anything but to go along and help you and eat out of your pot."