“Kill hisself?”
She wagged her head dolefully. “First years of our life together, things went good for us. We lived on his daddy’s farm, worked it together, one big family. Then his pa died, took by the lung sickness, coughing up blood till he got so weak he couldn’t fight off the fever anymore. Next year Roman’s ma was taken by cholera. They kept her in to town, in an old chicken coop an’ away from folks so she wouldn’t make no others sick. It near tore Roman apart. But, everyone said it was the best for our children. We had two who could walk by then, and one just born too.”
“Losing your family ain’t good on a body’s heart,” he said. “Your mother, Marissa, how’s she now?”
“I haven’t seen her in over five years,” Amanda confessed. “Wanted to see her one last time before we started to Oregon, but by then she was married to a river man and moved east to Owensboro. On the Ohio. I pray she’s been well—there’s so much sickness back there. I hope we can keep on going to Oregon without losing any more folks.”
“You ain’t lost some of your own young’uns?”
“Mercy, no,” and she shook her head. “Others. People we came to know as the train was forming up outside of Westport. Lost friends on the way here. All along the Platte, they took sick, one after another. A child here. A mother there. A father on down the trail a few more miles. Seemed like every Sunday morning we had another person already ailing so bad for us to pray over them. By the time the week was out, we’d have us a funeral. Wasn’t till we got to Chimney Rock that we wasn’t burying folks along the way.”
“Air got drier,” he explained quietly. “Maybe some of that ague an’ tick-sicks got dried up.”
“Yes, it does seem we’re all healthier now,” she agreed. “Thank God for His blessings.”
“Yes, Amanda,” he agreed as he pulled his daughter against him again. “Thank God for all His great an’ many blessings.”
She raised herself on the toes of her dusty, cracked boots and planted a kiss on his grimy cheek. The black soot she came away with around her mouth made him laugh. Dipping the cuff of a sleeve on his shirt into the water bucket, he dabbed it around her cracked lips.
“You ought’n keep some tallow on your mouth,” he advised. “Won’t get so sore like it is.”
“I’ll be fine,” she claimed. “We’ll all be fine once we get to Oregon. Everything Roman’s read says it rains plenty there. Crops grow nearly by themselves, all the papers say.”
“It’s a good place for to raise crops, Amanda,” he confirmed. “Raise up your family too.”
“C’mon, Pa,” she prodded him, pulling on an elbow toward the edge of the brush awning. “I want you to introduce me to your wife, to all your children.”
He stopped in his tracks. “How’m I gonna meet your family?”
“I don’t think the company’s moving on for two, maybe three, more days,” she declared. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to meet them tomorrow.”
“Want to meet ’em?” he exclaimed. “Hell, I want you go fetch ’em right now and bring the hull clan back here a hour or so afore suppertime.”
“T-today?”
“So we got some time to talk afore an’ after supper both!”
That seemed to strike her speechless for a moment. “Is this an invite to supper with your family, Pa?”
“Damn right—er, ’scuse me, Amanda,” he apologized. “Bring that husband of your’n, and those four young’uns over for supper. I’ll tell Waits-by-the-Water to put another hindquarter to roast over the fire for supper —”
“Waits-by-the-Water,” she repeated. “Ever since St. Louis, I’ve punished myself for not remembering her name. All these years, I wished I could have remembered your wife’s name.”
“S’all right now,” he said. “I hope you two take to each other.”
“When I was walking back here from camp alone to see you, I kept thinking that she must surely be used to white women, since you two live here at Major Bridger’s fort where so many white folks come through all summer long. But I was afraid too that she’d look down her nose at me for being a silly young white woman.”
“I don’t think Waits-by-the-Water could look down her nose at anyone,” he stated. “She’s the kindest, most gentle an’ loving person I met in my whole blamed life, Amanda.”
“Wouldn’t want her thinking any less of me because I’m younger than her, white and all.”
“How old are you now?” he asked her, failing to recall.
“I turned thirty-two on the trail, Pa. Back in June, along the North Platte.”
His face screwed up a minute as he did his best ciphering right there in his head. “Thirty-two? Why, you ain’t much younger’n Waits is. She’s in her thirty-second summer.”
“Sh-she’s the same age as me?”
He nodded. “Can’t be more’n a few months older’n you, at the most. Why, that alone’ll give you two so much to talk about.”
“She speaks English?”
“Waits talks real good American. Magpie and Flea too. Jackrabbit, now he’s getting the hang of it as he gets older.”
She smiled. “Supper here sounds grand, Pa. If you don’t think we’ll be imposing on her, Waits-by-the- Water.”
“I don’t think there’s a chance of that, Amanda,” he explained. “Soon as I came back to Taos to fetch her north to her home country, I started telling her all about you, ’bout your mother and grandpa too. We even talked about me takin’ her back to St. Louie some time, to look you up and spend some time. But … St. Louie and all them folks, all them farms an’ houses an’ crowded towns back there—just never seemed like a good enough idea for me to do.”
Amanda nodded and reached out to take one of his gritty hands in both of hers. “So, I had to come west to find you, didn’t I?”
“That what you was intendin’ to do?”
“No, I really never thought I’d see you again, Pa,” she confessed. “Figured you’d be dead, killed by Injuns or bears or froze in the mountains by now. Never figured I’d hear your name spoken again in the balance of my days.”
“Then you heard tell of Titus Bass in the store at Fort Bridger.”
She laughed. “Even heard your name cursed at Fort Laramie. The Frenchmen there swore they’d love to cut your throat, if they ever got hands on you!”
“So you figgered I’d gone under awready?”
“Chances weren’t good for a man surviving this long out here, Pa—were they?”
“No, Amanda,” he admitted. “But, I had the spirits smiling down on me ever’ since I come west in twenty- five. Ain’t no other reason I come through all the scrapes I put behind me.”
“God’s been good seeing me through this journey so far, Pa,” she said, casting down her eyes. “Lately, we haven’t had the best life, Roman and me.”
His eyes narrowed. “He ain’t been bad to you, has he?”
She looked at him again, saying, “No, no—Roman’s been a good husband. Strong and full of love, Pa. For me and the children. God knows he isn’t the brightest man I could have married, but he had the best heart.”
“Why you say you ain’t had the best life, you two?”
Shrugging her shoulders, Amanda turned slightly from her father. “Sometimes I think there’s certain people just not meant to make a go of things in life. No matter how hard they try, no matter they throw their whole heart into something … time after time.”
“There’s some folks who wander this way and that afore they eventual’ find the way of their life,” he responded after a long moment of thought. “Your own pa was that sort, Amanda.”
“There’s been times when it was real hard on the children,” she explained, looking up at him again. “Row … my Roman—sometimes he gets dark. Those were the times I could tell the failure was eating him up inside, Pa. He’d look around at other folks who had a store and they’re making a little money for their family. Or, Roman would look around and see other folks making the ground work for them, feeding their family and putting a little money away for the lean times. But … seems like it’s always been lean times for us. Never got any better. Last few years, we been going from bad times to worse times, no matter what Roman threw himself into with all his might.”
From the look on her face and the sound of her words, he was almost afraid to ask her the question, “You
