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Mr. Warren left that morning, and watching him ride away I felt as I did when Timothy of the Nez Perce abandoned me and I feared I’d never see my mother again. I shouted after Mr. Warren, running out onto the porch, seeing him as he rode
from around the barn to the lane. “Don’t you want to know my decision?”

He brought up the horse, twisted in the saddle. “I’ll see you soon.” He whooped and twirled his hat, upsetting his horse, which pranced, switched its tail, then took Mr. Warren away.

How did he know that watching him disappear brought on a compulsion to pack and follow, to seek the safety of my life with him and not as a woman left behind? I’d be taking a different route to join him but hadn’t I always? God willing, I would find him, his cattle, and his dream. Maybe I’d find myself. The fear lifted.

“Let’s get started,” I told Millie. “We have a journey to make!”

I missed my sister Martha as I packed. She was fun to have around, made me laugh as she tossed flour on my nose and with Millie would insist we ride bareback in the hills behind the house. She reminded me that I’m not a matron with two children but a girl still, at twenty-one. “You never outgrow the need for adventure,” she told me once, a twinkle in her eye. “Without it, how will you fill your heart?”

“My heart is full with my children. I have the Scriptures to sustain me.”

“And your children will draw from you so you must find ways to keep the well filled. Yes, the Scriptures. But even they speak of music and dancing and laughter. Papa doesn’t preach much on those sections, but they are there. I’ve read them. And if it were written in our time they would have added riding on fast horses with the wind in your face.” She spoke with that certainty I was seeing as a Spalding trait. And I had thwarted that by betraying her attempt to fill her heart with Bill Wigle. So had my father.

I placed the mirror and pedestal in the trunk, catching a glimpse of myself: a drawn look with hollow cheeks and a straight ink line for lips. I ought to smile more.

“Look at baby Lizzie.” America Jane pointed at a different mirror she sat at with her sister. “She sees herself.”

I snatched my daughter, turned her baby face into my chest, my hand pushing her head into me. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Nothing. Let’s just get things ready so we can follow
Papo.
” I didn’t know why I’d swept my infant from the mirror.
Something my mother
once told me?

“Mr. Warren might have waited, helped a little,” I said to the children.

“At least you have me,” Millie said. She entered from the chicken house, brought in eggs she’d fix for our breakfast. She placed her hands on her low back, sighed. She’d already carried in a heavy bucket of water we’d use to wash with when we finished packing.

The sun had been up for hours and I needed good strength to tell my father we were leaving. After breakfast, I harnessed the horse to the wagon, put the girls in. Millie held Lizzie steady while Maka pulled our rig, trotting us toward what I knew would be disaster. It would happen even though I anticipated it. This time I wasn’t wrong.

My father paced around, waving his arms as though preaching. “I forbid it! You cannot take your children to that country. You cannot.”

“Mr. Warren and I will decide for me and our family, Father.”

“You never should have married him. He’s unpredictable, lacks common sense, and this move is but another example.”

I remained calm, as my mother would have done.

“You’re disappointed, Father. But a wife is duty-bound to go
with her husband. As my mother did, even resisting your telling her that long trip from New York would be too hard with her illness. But she came anyway.”

“Yes. She came anyway because she felt God telling her to come with me and I agreed. After a time. Thank goodness. Whatever would I have done without her?” His eyes got that faraway look that consumed him when my mother’s memory was invoked. I was glad Rachel was out in the washhouse, though what she did there I couldn’t imagine. Millie had gone out to assist her, so she wasn’t there to hear what my father said next. “You will do what you will. You always did. But you will not take Amelia, and Martha Jane has no will to be with you.”

“She’d be far from Bill Wigle.”

“I’ll monitor that. They are my responsibility and I will not allow them to go there among the Indians that are not our Nimíipuu. They are the only Indians I trust. I can’t believe Warren is taking you so close to the Cayuse. And with the Yakima Wars just ended.”

“Why you trust the Nez Perce I don’t understand. They forced me to stay at Waiilatpu. They held you and Mama hostage, then sent us all away and—”

“They sustained us, Eliza. They kept us alive.”

I shook my head. His memory was twisted as a rope.

“It was the Mission Board that insisted we all leave.”

“That’s not what Mama thought. Timothy, the Nez Perce, they failed us, can’t you see? They invited you to come, then sent you away.” My stomach clenched, inviting a subject change. “The land is good that Mr. Warren claims.”

“Pshaw! What does he know of land? Or hard work. Or beginning a life in a harsh landscape. No, I ought to insist you leave your daughters with us here along with Millie and Martha.”

“I’m not staying, Papa. I’m going with Eliza.”

Father turned to Millie who had come back inside. I wondered where Martha was. Probably off with Bill Wigle!

“No. I decide. You stay here.”

“She needs help, Father. Two small children, driving an ox team by herself? You would sentence her to that?” A voice of support: my sister Martha Jane who had just entered. “You’re aware of the trials. You’ve talked of them.” She appealed to the compassionate side of him. I nodded to her, hoping she could see my gratitude.

“Your choices are mine to make. Let her hire a driver if her Warren is so flush he can leave without selling his property here. Let her hire another wagon to take everything with them. Everything except my girls. And may the Lord forgive me for not retaining custody of my granddaughters, as their parents lack common sense, are loony, and put them in harm’s way.”

The furies found me. “You speak of harm’s way? What of the times you left my mother alone with these two?” I nodded to my sisters. “What about the times you took Henry and me miles from home, risking our lives? We nearly froze to death when we crossed the flooded Snake and you wouldn’t let us build a fire. Or the time you took us to the Pacific. If we hadn’t been taken in by that mixed-blood Indian when we crossed the Cascades, we might have been lost forever in the mountains, never seen the ocean. What of the time you ran the Indians into acting out death and dying before our eyes? Do you remember that?”

I recalled in great detail the foreshadowing of death at Waiilatpu. How terrified I was when the hair came off at the end of a knife held by men I recognized and, yes, loved. I thought Timothy was dead, that Raymond had killed him. The screams and shouts and horses as fired up as the portrayers, prancing, twisting, dust rising with a hundred hooves while those along
the sidelines cheered them on. Thank God that my mother took us inside.

“I remember strong children who weren’t all that cold in the last miles. You never complained. And God provided that Indian in the Cascades. I remember a fine display of horsemanship, which is what I hoped Reverend Lee would see.” Father’s gaze took him to the past. “And the contrast between their devotion to God and what they’d once been.”

“Some still are ‘what they’d once been.’” I’d heard rumors of converts returning to old ways.

“Not the Nimíipuu, no. Cayuse, yes. Some Umatilla, too, which is why I will not allow your sisters to travel with you to their country. Millie will return with you and get her things. I’ll come fetch her in the morning. It’s decided.”

“What’s decided?” Rachel stepped through the door, her round face dripping with laundry room sweat. Maybe she had learned how to heat the water and blue the whites.

“Millie is coming home.”

“Lovely,” Rachel said and plopped onto the hickory rocker, fanning her face with her apron. I marveled at the ease with which she accepted whatever surprises life offered.

We two were silent on the way back. At the cabin, we put the little ones down to sleep, fixed a light supper. We were finishing when Millie said, “I’ll defy him.”

“No. He’s right. There is a danger in that country.” The memory of the spectacle just reinforced what I already knew. We weren’t that far out from the finish of the Yakima uprising and we headed where disgruntled Cayuse roamed. Land of the Umatilla, of Chief Five Crows, the one who had tortured Lorinda. And maybe, in a season, there’d be Nez Perce, and who was to say if they still kept Christian ways or in the twelve
years since we’d left Lapwai if they too were now “what they’d once been.” At any rate, I didn’t want to find out.

“But you’ll need help, Sister.”

I nodded, then reached for her hand as we sat at the table. “I’ll find someone. I’ll see if I can get another couple to join us, bring their wagon and possibly have room for some of our things too. Maybe a woman to assist with the children. I can walk beside the ox team, but I’ll need muscle for the yokes. I don’t know who to hire, but I will pray for the right person and trust that if this is my call then God knows what I need.”

18
That Which Sustains

Father came the following day and took my sister away. I wept after they left. “We’ll see each other again,” I told Millie, who looked every bit her almost thirteen years. I thanked her for what she’d given me and thought then I needed to thank Martha too. They’d been my companions when Mr. Warren wandered away. It made me wonder how my mother ever said good-bye to Matilda or if she’d had the chance to do so once we were all sent from Lapwai.

“Are you busy?”

Nancy Osborne put her head in the door. I wiped my eyes with my apron.

“Is a mother of two ever not busy?” I said it with a light voice. Nancy had that fragile look on her face she got sometimes. I never wanted to say anything that might push her into silence.

“I suppose not.” She came through the door and stood beside me, closer than I would normally prefer, but she did that,
too, on her “bad days.” She found safety in being close to taller bodies. I wanted a wide berth, didn’t even like people standing behind me at the mercantile. I’d step aside and allow others to go first rather than imagine them hovering there behind me, no telling what they might do to harm me.

I handed her Lizzie and pumped water from the spring into the teapot and set it to brew on the woodstove. Mr. Warren had said he’d purchase a stove for me once we were in Touchet. I wasn’t to bring this one.

I had the use of this old woodstove I’d come to love until we left and the farm sold. At least we had a farm to sell. I feared when he told me we were moving that he’d lost it in a card game. When I questioned him about the area being closed to non-Indians, something provided for in last year’s treaty, he waved his hand at me, dismissive.

Having a stove go with our farmstead would be a selling point, he’d said. I just hoped he didn’t forget his promise.

Nancy sat with my daughter on her lap. She wiped the edge of Lizzie’s mouth with her apron. “I’m feeling sad about your going, I guess. Brings back memories, dark ones.”