There was the widower Willoughby, sorrowful as could be. Never knew when he wa9 going to break into tears. Last night just before supper, Annabel said something about the nice stitching on the pinafore his toddler was wearing. Willoughby put his face in his hands and started crying. Must’ve been his wife had made the pinafore. Went back to his wagon, climbed up on the seat, sat there with his face in his hands, weeping. Wouldn’t touch a bite of food. His daughter Julia went over to him and touched him on the shoulder.
“Pa?” she said.
“Yes, darlin.”
“Pa?”
“Yes, darlin, that’s all right, darlin.”
Timothy was still trying to draw a picture of the carpenter. Be a miracle if he got anything at all down on paper, way Comyns ran around like a man half his age. Maybe had to move fast to keep that titty young wife of his happy on her back. Bobbo got up from where he was sitting, and wandered over to Timothy. His head bent over his pad, he kept scribbling away with the pencil. Bobbo stood directly in front of him, trying to sneak a look around the edge of the pad. Didn’t want the man to think he was nosy.
“How many miles you expect we’ll cover today?” he asked.
“Oh, fourteen, fifteen,” Timothy said, without looking up.
“Has Willoughby talked to you about maybe turning back?”
“He has.”
“Do you think he will?”
“I’m hoping not,” Timothy said.
“Seems a man talking about it so much is a man going to do it. Don’t it appear that way to you?”
“Maybe,” Timothy said. “What do you think of this?” he asked suddenly, and turned the pad so Bobbo could see it.
Jonah Comyns was there on paper exactly.
Quick sure pencil strokes delineated the long angular body with its massive chest and shoulders, the oversize hands and thick fingers. A thatch of hair sprouted from the head of the drawn image as wildly and as randomly as did Comyns’s real hair. Here, too, were the quirky eyebrows and fiercely burning eyes, the nose that could split a log, the thickish lips, and something more — Timothy had captured on paper the restless energy of the man. Looking at the pencil sketch, Bobbo was certain it would leap off the page at any moment, run scurrying to tend to the animals or the fire, shout an order to a son.
He did not know he could be so moved by pencil marks on paper. Speechlessly, he stared at the drawing, and realized that Timothy was waiting for his reaction.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I ever seen,” Bobbo said.
There was an instant’s silence. Timothy looked up sharply into Bobbo’s face, searching it for insincerity. Then, so softly Bobbo almost couldn’t hear him, he said, “Thank you.”
Sarah Comyns was nursing her baby when the Indian appeared.
They’d camped the night of the thirteenth on the bluffs overlooking the Kansas River, three to four miles wide there, the river valley thick with timber, the hills rising from a prairieland as green as Minerva’s eyes. In the morning, they moved on to a nooning place where the river was boiling yellow. Their rest period seemed in contrast more peaceful than it normally did, the stillness of the camp exaggerated by the incessant roar of the river. The men were talking about how they planned to get to the other side. Timothy suggested that they take off the wheels and float the wagons across like barges. But there were no hides to nail to the bottoms, and Comyns was afraid they’d sink without waterproofing. Hadley thought they should build themselves a raft. There was plenty timber to cut, and fashioning a raft was a simple thing enough. The women had washed the dinnerware and put it up already; Minerva and the girls were resting now in the shade under the trees. Inside the Comyns wagon, Sarah briskly removed a breast from within the unbuttoned yoke of her bodice, reacquainted her baby’s mouth with the oozing nipple, and then cupped breast in hand, kneading it, her eyes closed as the baby began to suck. When lazily she opened her eyes again, the Indian was staring in at her from the rear of the wagon.
He was at least five feet ten inches tall, his face an oval with prominent cheekbones, eyes almost the color of his skin, long black hair falling to his shoulders. He said something to her, Sarah didn’t know what and didn’t care. She yanked her squirting breasts loose from her baby’s mouth and began screaming. The Indian turned and ran from the wagon. He got no more than ten feet toward the woods beyond when Jonah Comyns dragged him kicking to the ground. There was a pistol in Comyns’s hand. He put it at once to the Indian’s head. In that moment, Timothy came running around the corner of the wagon. “Hold your fire!” he yelled, and clamped both hands onto the carpenter’s wrist.
“Let go!” Comyns shouted. “I’ll shoot the bastard dead!”
Inside the wagon, the baby began shrieking. The Indian was babbling frantically now, the pistol flailing closer and closer to his head, Timothy desperately trying to hear his words over the baby’s squawling and Comyns’s shouting. The widower Willoughby came running toward the wagon with his suspenders hanging, a rifle in his hands, his face pale. The youngest Comyns boy ran up and began dancing a frightened little jig.
“Let him be!” Timothy shouted. “He wants to ferry us across the river!”
From inside the wagon, Sarah said, “He spied me naked.”
The Indian was a Delaware.
He had come as spokesman for his tribe, searching for someone with whom he might negotiate, and had peered into the nearest wagon only to find himself face to face with a crazed white woman. Now that everyone had calmed down, he explained that his tribe, together with their partners the Shawnee, had constructed a raft sturdy enough to transport the party across the river. This for a price the white man would surely recognize as reasonable. He said all this in Algonquian — which Timothy understood but incompletely. He gathered the Delaware’s name was Ferocious Storm, but it might well have been Fearful Storm, or indeed Fear of Storms; the Indian spoke quite rapidly, never once deferring to Timothy, who was trying to converse in a tongue not his own.
Ferocious Storm asked a gallon jug of whiskey for each wagon his people carried across the river. In addition, he wanted four eggs for each. And three kegs of flour. And a dozen trinkets he would personally select from whatever jewelry the women had with them, plus thirteen yards of blue homespun.
They haggled for close to an hour.
By the end of that time, Ferocious Storm had reduced his total price to one gallon jug of whiskey, half a dozen eggs, two small kegs of flour, two calico bonnets he saw the women in the camp wearing, and in place of the jewelry and the thirteen yards of homespun, six slabs of bacon. Timothy said they would give the Indians all save the whiskey and the meat.
“Then I will have some sweets,” Ferocious Storm said.
“Sweets as how?” Timothy asked. “Preserves.”
“In what amount?”
“Three jars of fruits.”
“Nonsense.”
“It is my price,” Ferocious Storm said, and rose to leave.
“Two jars and we have a bargain.”
“The river is high; we will have to work hard against it. Three jars.”