Jubilee Trail (17 page)

“Yes, Reynolds?”

“How’re you, Mrs. Hale?” the horseman said cordially. “Rabbit Ear Creek,” he said to Oliver. “We’re about to corral.”

“Good. Water in the creek?”

“So-so. Brush. We’ll have to hack.”

“Thanks, Reynolds,” said Oliver. Garnet sighed rapturously. Mr. Reynolds grinned at her.

“Yes ma’am, I feel like that too. I could eat an ox.”

He hurried on to tell the next man. The shouts began to go up from end to end of the train.

“Rabbit Ear Creek! Corral!”

Garnet scrambled over the back of the seat, into the body of the carriage. She began letting down the four canvas sides. This meant the nooning, three blessed hours for rest and food. Having closed the carriage for privacy, she took off her sunbonnet and shook down her hair, and got her wash-basin out of the chest. She waited for the carriage to stop before filling it. As long as the carriage was moving, water would splash out of the basin and be wasted. While the carriage jogged, she occupied the time by brushing her hair.

She felt the carriage stop. Drawing the front curtain aside she spoke to Oliver.

“All right, Oliver?”

“All right. Save some water for me.”

Garnet made her way through the dim body of the carriage to the back, where she dipped a bucket into the water-barrel. The men were rushing about and shouting as though they had never lined the wagons for a nooning before. Mr. Reynolds, riding past her, waved and called a greeting.

She waved back at him. Lowering the curtain again, she took off her dress and did as much washing as she could with her ration of water. She pinned her hair in two tight braids across her head. Here on the trail it was foolish to leave any ringlets blowing to catch the dust. When she had buttoned her dress she rolled up the sides of the carriage and got out to empty the soiled water. Her elbow resting on a carriage-wheel, she watched the men make corral.

The great wagons lumbered up in four lines, as they had been moving all day. When they came in sight of the creek, the heavy wagons waited until the light vehicles had drawn into a group, close together. Then the bullwhackers maneuvered the four lines of merchandise wagons so that they formed the four sides of a square around the drays and carriages. The men unhitched the oxen, and bound the wagons together with chains. This formed the corral. The big hollow square was like a fortress. Inside it the baggage, the men, and the animals were safe from attack.

They had had no Indian trouble. When they sighted parties of Indians, scouts would go out from the caravan with presents in one hand and guns in the other, and when they had all glub-glubbed eternal friendship the scouts came back to the train.

Garnet had found that Oliver was right about Indians. They did not often attack a Santa Fe caravan. They looked wistfully at the fine mules and horses, and would steal any of them that wandered from the line of march. But few Indians had guns. They were no match for the well-armed traders, and they knew it. She had not seen an Indian closer than a hundred yards off.

The men had left the corral open at one corner, through which the bullwhackers were leading the animals outside to graze. The men whose turn it was for guard duty took up their posts around the corral. The cooks went outside too, and began digging holes for their fires.

Garnet walked outside. Twenty men were hacking at the brush in the creek, to open a place where they could cross. As they hacked, other men laid the branches in the creek-bed, to make a road, so the wagons could get over without sticking in the mud. Still others were on their knees filling the water-barrels. The bullwhackers brought the oxen down to drink, shouting ear-scorching oaths while they herded the oxen downstream, so they would not wander up and pollute the water that was needed for human use. Garnet watched them all with admiration. The routine of the trail had a hard, strong beauty. Everybody knew what to do and how to do it. No wonder these men could laugh at fat Armijo’s tricks with the customs.

As she watched, the fragrance of coffee came up to her nostrils. It reminded her that she had had nothing to eat since last night. She had brought her bowl and cup from the carriage, so now she looked around for Oliver’s cook.

She saw him, squatting on the ground before a shallow hole in which he had made a fire of buffalo dung. There were no trees hereabouts, and therefore no wood. For weeks now, their only fuel had been buffalo chips. The brush of the creeks was no good. It blazed up quickly, but died down before it had done more than warm the outside of the pots. Buffalo chips did not blaze much, but they smoldered with a slow, steady heat, and the pile of them in the fire-hole looked like a heap of glowing coals.

Oliver’s cook was a lean young fellow from Missouri, named Luke. Luke had set up two stout iron rods at either end of the fire, with a bar across them, from which hung a big pot of buffalo-meat and another of coffee. Besides the pots, Luke had set up several pairs of long thin sticks for cooking bread. The bread-sticks were stuck into the ground on either side of the fire-hole, and leaned against each other over the fire. Around the sticks Luke had wrapped long strips of dough, and he sat turning the sticks carefully so the dough would be baked on all sides.

Half a dozen of Oliver’s men were already lined up before the fire, waiting to be fed. They grinned at Garnet as she approached. She smiled back at them, asking if Rabbit Ear Creek was going to be a hard crossing.

No ma’am it wasn’t, they told her; they’d have been glad if it was harder, because that would have meant more water in the creek. It was tough giving the oxen enough to drink, when you had such a stingy little creek to do it with.

While they talked they kept looking at her, as though she were the most beautiful object on earth. Before she left New York, Garnet had never dreamed that there were any circumstances in which men would show such frank consciousness of her sex. At first it had shocked and humiliated her. By this time she knew she had to put up with it, and her best defense was to ignore it. The men were not going to bother her, some of them because they were decent fellows and others because they knew Oliver would shoot them if they did. But though she had been very innocent about these things when she took the trail, it had not taken her long to find out that she could easily have been a disturbing element among them.

She was the only American woman in the train. There were four Mexican women, wives of bullwhackers, who went back and forth every year to take care of their husbands. When Garnet passed their cooking-fire they always smiled politely and said, “Buenos días, señora.” But they made no attempt to be friendly, because their husbands were bullwhackers and her husband was a trader, and the lines of caste on the trail were strict.

Garnet tried to meet all the men in a pleasant but impersonal manner. But not all of them met her like this. Some of the men avoided her; some of them never missed a chance to speak to her; others gave her an exaggerated courtesy. Only a few of them, like Mr. Reynolds, had enough self-possession to treat her in an ordinary friendly way. She had noticed that when they stopped for the night the other carriages always left a space around the carriage that she and Oliver occupied. The bullwhackers, who rolled up in their blankets and slept on the ground, never went to sleep close to her carriage. It was not as if the men had any particular delicacy of feeling. It was simply as if they wanted to keep away from something they would rather not be reminded of until they got to Santa Fe. Oliver had never said anything about this to her. She wondered if he thought she had not observed it.

But not even Oliver, dear and adoring as he was, knew how much this journey was teaching her. In her six weeks on the trail Garnet had learned more than in all her years at school. Along with the hardening of her body had come a wise hardening of her mind. She was not sure she could have put it into words. Even if she could have done so, she had no other woman to talk to and she did not think any man would understand it.

She did wish there was another American woman along. A woman friend would have eased the strain of so much new knowledge. They would probably have talked about it, but even if they had not, there was so much else they would have talked about. They could have told each other how hard it was to wash their long hair when they had to be so careful of water, and they could have wondered how the styles in clothes were changing while they were away. Things like that, woman-talk. Men did not understand woman-talk and they could not be expected to. But when women shared confidences about any of their own feminine concerns they had an understanding of the rest. She supposed it was the same way with men. Men probably had things in common that they could not share with even the wisest and most beloved women. Garnet wondered how Oliver would have liked spending weeks and weeks in a company of women without a single man to speak to. She had never thought about this before, the curious lonesomeness it gave you to be cut off from your own sex. As she stood among the men of Oliver’s crew, waiting for Luke to cook the buffalo-meat, Garnet reflected that she was really growing up.

“Yes ma’am,” Luke said to her heartily. “Here you are, straight from the hump-ribs.”

Garnet started, and her reflections vanished in the reminder of how hungry she was. “Oh, thank you, Luke!” she exclaimed. She watched him scoop up the stew with his big ladle. Luke filled her bowl, and the odor of the rich meat stew was so exquisite that it made her shiver.

Luke poured coffee into her cup, and took up a bread-stick that had been set to cool across his basket of dried buffalo-meat. He touched the bread to make sure it was cool enough to handle, and slipped it off the stick. Garnet broke off a big piece and hurried off to eat.

She sat down on the ground, leaning her back against a wheel of one of Oliver’s wagons. The meat was steaming hot and it had a thick gravy with beans floating in it. The coffee was hot, and the bread was hot too, crusty on the outside and soft in the middle. In place of butter, she spread her bread with marrow from the thigh-bone of a buffalo, and sprinkled it with salt.

It was all so good! Garnet thought about the meals at home, served on white tablecloths with china and silver and crystal. They had been pretty, but they had never tasted as good as this. She ate every morsel, scraped out the bowl with a piece of bread, and went back to the cooking-fire.

“Luke, I’m ashamed of myself,” she said as she held out her bowl.

“Now, Mrs. Hale,” he objected, “buffaloes is meant to be et.” He filled her bowl again, and grinned as he poured out the coffee. “Eat it all up, I wouldn’t have no job if you folks didn’t like my cooking.”

Garnet laughed and went off to gobble some more. As she sat down by the wagon she saw Oliver coming up from the creek and going over to Luke to get his dinner. On his way he passed the fire where the four Mexican women were cooking. They glanced with approval at his long strides and his big muscular body and exclaimed together, “¡Buenos días, Don Olivero!” Hungry as he was, Oliver paused long enough to smile back at them and say, “¡Buenos días, señoras! ¿Cómo están ustedes?” Oliver liked being noticed by women. But he had given Garnet no reason to be jealous. He was passionately in love with her, and so she had been glad to see how much other women admired him. She was proud that such an attractive man had chosen her. But she did suspect that he had made a good many conquests before he chose her. She did not know much about these things, but she had sense enough to guess that no man could be as expert a lover as he was unless he had already had abundant experience.

Oliver brought his bowl over and grinned at her as he sat down. He liked seeing her enjoyment of the buffalo-meat, as he had liked watching her excitement in the theater where she had first seen Florinda. He was showing her his part of the world, and as he did it he had the frank pleasure of a boy showing his playthings to his chum.

For a while he was too busy with his dinner to talk. But when he had finished, and they sat sipping still more coffee, Garnet asked,

“Can I wash any clothes today?”

“I’ll bring you some water.” He gave her a smile of apology. “I’m afraid it won’t be very much.”

“Oh dear,” said Garnet. “When I get to Santa Fe I’m going to soak in soapsuds for a whole day, and scrub my clothes till I make holes in them.”

“You can soak all you please, but you won’t need to scrub your clothes,” Oliver promised her. “Señora Silva will do your laundry.”

“Just think,” said Garnet, “having clothes ironed again!”

Oliver smiled at her affectionately. His cheeks crinkled above his beard. “Is it very hard on you, all this?”

“No, really it isn’t. Everything is such fun, and I feel so well all the time.” Oliver was about to get to his feet to bring the water, but she stopped him. “Wait a minute. I want to ask you something.”

“Go ahead. To you, my life is an open book.”

“Oliver—you said awhile ago that I wasn’t to worry about Charles. Will he be very much upset to find you’re married?”

“Oh Garnet,” Oliver exclaimed, “don’t bother about him. Charles will be surprised to find I’m married to an American girl, that’s all. He’s been hoping I’d marry a California girl from one of the big rancho families. Charles is ambitious.”

“But haven’t you got a right to marry anybody you please? What business is it of his?”

“No business at all, you’re right,” Oliver said. He got up. “Don’t bother about Charles,” he repeated. “Please don’t.”

He spoke lightly, but she could not help feeling that his lightness was not quite sincere. She looked up at him keenly. “I wouldn’t—but aren’t you bothered about him? Just a little bit?”

Oliver did not seem to hear her. He said, “I’ll meet you at the carriage,” and went off.

Garnet looked after him. Funny, the way Oliver tightened up whenever Charles was mentioned. But he was right about one thing: this was no time to bother about it. She had work to do.

Oliver had left his eating utensils with her. She carried them down to the clear place in the creek, and scrubbed them with sand before going back inside the corral. Already some of the men were stretching out on the ground for their midday nap. Garnet picked her way among them. Mr. Reynolds, who sat on the ground by his own carriage, sewing a button on his shirt, called to her merrily.