Minerva hadn’t realized how lonely she’d been for the companionship of another woman. They had left Independence only yesterday morning, but now with the new day stretching ahead as endlessly as the prairie itself, she turned eagerly to Sarah Comyns.
“I’ve never been to Baltimore,” she said. “What sort of place is it?”
“Oh, it’s very nice,” Sarah said.
Silence.
They were sitting together inside the Comyns wagon, sunlight illuminating the cover so that everything within took on a golden glow. The wagon was packed even more tightly than the Chisholms’ own. They sat on stools the carpenter himself had made, swaying with the roll of the wagon, bouncing whenever it hit a ridge or a rut. The baby was asleep on Sarah’s lap. This morning she’d suckled the child in the privacy of her own wagon; Minerva guessed the carpenter had spoken to her about showing her teats to all and any.
“Big city, is it?” Minerva said.
“Oh, yes,” Sarah said.
“About the size of Louisville?”
“I guess,” Sarah said.
Silence.
“Did you live in the city itself?” Minerva asked. “Or outside of it?”
“Yes.”
“In it?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“Husband have a shop there?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Must be interestin being married to a man can fashion things with his own two hands.”
“Yes, it is,” Sarah said.
“Hadley puts his hand to making a table or chair, it comes out all catty-wampus.”
“Oh, yes,” Sarah said, and laughed.
“My Gideon’s the one has a sure hand with a hammer and nail,” Minerva said. “You haven’t met him; he’s off with his brother in Illinois. Man stole my eldest son’s horse, big raindrop gelding, beauty of a horse. Just rode off with it one night. I miss him somethin fierce,” she said, and found herself confiding to Sarah that Gideon was her favorite, had been from the minute the granny woman laid him puny and wet across her belly. Loved them all to death, she did, but for Gideon she felt something special, a kind of... joy, she supposed it was, every time she saw him. She knew it was wrong worrying about them the way she did; they were both grown men and knew how to take care of themselves. But they’d been gone more’n three weeks already. Last time she’d seen them was on the twentieth of May, Gideon waving from his saddle, big grin on his face.
“I guess that’s the nature of it, though,” Minerva said. “Worrying over your children even when they’re all growed up.”
“Oh, yes,” Sarah said.
Minerva decided she was a twit.
When they stopped for their nooning that day, it seemed a break in the routine, though it was itself a part of it. The sky had been blown flawlessly clear by the storm the night before; they could see everywhere around them for miles and miles. A stream surprised the landscape here. They watered the animals and drank themselves, and then filled the barrels and kegs. Bobbo and the Comyns boys started the cooking fires, and the women fried the meat and boiled the vegetables they’d bought in Independence. There was the smell of coffee and of warmed corn bread. After the noonday meal, they dozed. The voices of Annabel and Willoughby’s eldest girl broke the golden stillness.
“Do you get it now?”
“No, I don’t.”
She had stringy brown hair and eyes like a cat’s, yellow with flecks of green. Must’ve been her mother’s eyes; Willoughby’s were as brown as Christmas pudding. Her name was Julia.
“It’s a cipher, is all,” Annabel said.
“But what use is it?”
“Say I want to send you a letter in Lancaster—”
“I don’t live in Lancaster no more.”
“Just say. And I wanted to tell you something secret.”
“What would you want to tell me?”
“Well... I don’t know,” Annabel said. “Say I wanted to cuss or somethin.”
“Would you?”
“Course not, we’re just sayin. So I’d whip out the cipher here and write it all in code, and nobody but you or me’d be able to read it.”
“Let me see it again,” Julia said.
Annabel showed her the scrap of paper.
“Say you wanted to make an A,” Annabel said.
“Yeah, how’d you do it?”
“You see those lines around the A there?”
“What lines?”
“The one under it, and the one comin down to meet it. You just draw them two lines instead of the A,” Annabel said. “Them two lines take the place of the A — you get it?”
Julia studied the cipher again. “But then it’d be the same for J, wouldn’t it?”
“No, the J’s got a dot.”
“Oh,” Julia said. “Yeah.”
“You get it now?”
“Yeah,” Julia said, nodding.
“It’s good, ain’t it?”
“It’s real good,” Julia said. “Where’d you learn it?”
“Everybody back home knows it,” Annabel said.
What had appeared dull in southern Illinois seemed exciting now in retrospect. There, at least, a ridge, a knoll, a hillock rose occasionally to startle the unexpecting eye. Here, there was a wide road trodden level, the land on either side of it as flat as the road itself, stretching toward a horizon visible wherever one turned.
The effect was stultifying.
The wagons moved at the center of a perfect circle, the circle unchanging, the landscape eternally the same, the mules and the oxen and the horses plodding ahead but succeeding only in moving the circle intact, center and circumference, so that there was a sense of standing still rather than progressing.
They came fourteen miles that second day. The day before, they’d come sixteen by the chart. They were bone-weary when they formed the circle again at sunset. They made their fires, they posted their guards. They ate. They slept. In the morning, they moved on again.
They were emigrants, they supposed.
You look forward to nooning, Bobbo thought.
Damnedest thing ever.
Get off your horse, stretch your bones, eat some good hot food. Sit around afterward doing nothing. Just looking all around. Dozing. Looking again. Over there in the back of the Oates cart was Timothy’s Indian wife. Never budged out of that cart. Sat there day and night, you’d think her backside was glued to it. Appeared every bit as sorrowful as the widower, staring out over the prairie. Always looked west. Bobbo followed her gaze one time. Thought maybe she was seeing something he couldn’t make out. Wasn’t nothing out there. Not a damn thing.
Timothy’d brought her some food, and now he was taking his sketch pad and a boxful of pencils from the cart. Way he talked about painting and drawing made it sound like it was work. Like plowing a field or shoeing a horse. Bobbo couldn’t understand that. Friend of his, Roger Colby back home, was always drawing pictures, too, some of them pretty enough to frame. Bobbo himself couldn’t draw a straight line, but he admired people who could do that sort of thing. Draw pictures, a dogwood tree or something. But work? Hell, it wasn’t work. Still hadn’t seen any of Timothy’s pictures, didn’t know whether the man could really draw or was just wasting his own good time and God’s, too. He was sitting on a big rock now, watching every move the carpenter made. Trying to get a likeness, Bobbo supposed.