lips. As tears started welling from the farmer’s eyes, he scooped up Lucas’s hand between both of his. How small and white it looked to Titus now, lying there, protected between the father’s big, strong, hard-boned paws. How small and frail and helpless too.
Anyone close to that awning now, in the death-still quiet that held its grip on family and friends and fellow sojourners on this road to Oregon, could plainly make out how the boy’s breathing came harder and harder over the next excruciating minutes. Almost as if he were struggling to breathe under water. Short, shallow breaths—each successive one seeming to come quicker and quicker, as if the child would never again catch his breath. And with these last few moments came that pale bluish hue of impending death, its once-seen-never-to-be-forgotten color smeared beneath the tiny youngster’s eyes. How many times in all his living had Titus Bass witnessed that sheen paint its fateful crescent there against pale skin.
Grinding his teeth together the old trapper had gotten to his feet, feeling more weary than he could ever remember being. Without a word he turned away from the awning, his muscles tensed as he hurried on this vital errand to beg of Shadrach what he himself could not do.
At the front of the wagon he now spotted Sweete and Shell Woman. Lunging over the wagon tongue, Bass grabbed the Cheyenne by her shoulders and shook her, bringing her frightened face close to his when he snarled, “You gotta help that boy! Go put your hands on ’im, sing your prayers! Do what you gotta do to save him—”
“Scratch!” Sweete whispered as he jabbed an arm down between Toote and the old trapper, tugging them apart.
He looked up at his tall friend, desperation growing, a plea in his eyes, and in his voice, “You gotta tell ’er to come say her magic words, come help Lucas, Shadrach. For the love of all that’s holy—she can heal ’im.”
“I told you afore—the Cheyenne don’t have no medicine strong enough.”
The despair was growing, more than palpable in the pit of his belly. “How come she saved you … an’ she won’t save that boy?”
“Ain’t that at all,” Sweete said soothingly. Gradually he got Bass’s hands pried from Shell Woman’s arms and got his friend turned aside.
“You gotta make her save Lucas same way she saved you—”
Sweete suddenly shook the smaller man. “Goddammit! It’s different, Scratch.”
He stared at his friend’s eyes and asked, “How?”
Taking a long sigh, Shad explained, “Because when she healed my arm with her white buffler medicine … there wasn’t no spirit fighting her prayers.”
Bass squinted his eyes, attempting to get his mind around what he had just been told. “N-no spirit fightin’ her prayers?”
“All she had to do was stop that real bad bleedin’, an’ I was healed,” Sweete declared.
“What’s differ’nt here with that boy Lucas?”
Letting go of Titus, Shad said, “Toote told me the Cheyenne’s white buffler medicine ain’t no good fighting against a bad spirit.”
For a long, long time he stared into the tall man’s face. “The snake … it’s a bad spirit she can’t fight with her medeecin?”
“I … I’m real sorry, Scratch.”
He looked at Shell Woman now, feeling so hollow and dry, like everything good had been sucked right out of him. “I’m sorry too. Tell ’er, Shad. Tell ’er I’m sorry I grabbed ’er, if’n I hurt her—”
“Ti-tuzz,” Waits whispered behind him.
Turning, he found his wife standing at the corner of the wagon, holding a small brass kettle, steam rising from its surface in the full blast of summer’s hottest fury. In her other hand she held what looked to be a wet towel.
“What you made—will it help?” he asked her in Crow.
Her eyes already spoke their grim answer for him. Then she said, “No, but I made it from a root that will make it easier … his last journey … for him.”
Bass could see how hard it was for her to stand there without sobbing, without breaking down herself. After all she was a mother too, a woman carrying her baby in her belly right then … experiencing an unimaginable grief just in watching another mother hold her baby in her arms as that child lay dying. He took the kettle’s bail from her and carried it around the front of the wagon to set it beside Amanda. Magpie followed with her mother, leaning in to hand the white woman a spoon, then stepped back into that fringe of stunned onlookers.
Amanda looked up at Bass and his wife, asking, “What is it?”
“Waits made it. Maybeso it’s gonna help … help Lucas so he don’t hurt so much.”
Her eyes bounced back and forth between them for a moment, then she said, “If it will make his going easier, Pa.”
While Amanda raised Lucas up again and held a spoonful of the steamy broth against his lips, Titus knelt on the other side of the child, by the lower leg that was already blackening with an impatient death rising inexorably from the wound. Unwrapping the wet towel Waits handed down to him, Titus found inside a mash of roots and leaves. This dripping pulp he scooped up with his fingers and laid against the wounds, knowing the boy’s flesh was dying, if not already dead, the flesh darkening the way it was, those wound sites seeping a foul ooze. Lucas did not move the leg as Scratch wrapped the wet towel over the poultice.
After a half dozen sips of the steamy broth, Lucas barely managed to turn his head before his stomach revolted and emptied itself. As he watched his daughter, Scratch saw how Amanda positioned herself, refusing to look below her child’s waist anymore, to look at the snakebite, at the bloated, blackening leg. Instead, she kept her eyes only on Lucas’s face as she stroked his tiny arm and gently rocked the boy. Her tears spilled one by one onto the child’s pale, dusty shirt, each drop making its own muddy circle on the much-faded cloth.
Titus turned at the rustle and murmur behind him, watching Hoyt Bingham come through the crowd with a green bottle in his hand. The train’s other captain knelt just inside the late-afternoon shade of the awning and held out the bottle to Roman.
“May—maybe some whiskey help it,” the man offered.
Roman nodded to Titus, and Bingham shifted his offering to Bass. For a long moment he stared at that bottle in the settler’s hand, an old hunger raising its head in the pit of him—the sort of hunger that came when there was nothing else to do but numb a pain with the forgetfulness of liquor … then he looked at Bingham’s face again and those eyes pleading that he could find some way to help. At last Scratch looked down at how Roman held his son’s tiny hand, not thinking that offer of whiskey was such a fine idea after all.
“Maybeso later,” Titus said softly. “Likely … we could sure use that whiskey … a little later. Thankee most kindly.”
Again and again Waits and Toote brought steaming rags in a brass kettle, rags he held over the soupy poultice. Changing the rag that had cooled off for a hot one as the crowd around them breathed but did not mutter a word. Maybe they were all talked out for now. Nothing more to say. No words that could make any difference. Maybe not even prayer words. So he glanced up at those vacant eyes in those dusty faces here beside the Soda Springs where the small geyser spewed at that moment with a watery gush.
He was helpless as any of them were, these emigrant farmers who had no earthly reason to be out here in his wilderness when they should be back in their hardwood forests, or on in their promised land on the Willamette River of Oregon Territory. Anywhere but here, an unnamed, unmapped hell of the country more than halfway between where they’d come from and where they still dreamed of putting down new roots. Easy was it for Titus to read that despair on their faces. It could have been any child, their child, their youngest, the baby who would have grown up strong and bold in that far-off land of promise. But here they stood suspended in time and distance, much, much too far from their old homes to ever consider turning back for what was. Still too damn far from Oregon country to truly believe any of them could make it to that promised land without being forced to pay some terrible price for their wanting and hungering for it.
Everything came with a price, Titus brooded. The wanting of that paradise on the Willamette … it had come with a hard, hard price for this little family.
Was his wanting of a little paradise far, far to the north for his family going to come with some awful price as yet hidden beyond the horizon … somewhere out there where he could not see it coming, could not turn out of its way?
So he peered up at Bingham and Ryder, Murray and Truell, Fenton and Iverson, and all those nameless ones
