The Blessing Stone (65 page)

Hopes were high as the wagons made their way past streams jumping with trout, fields carpeted with wild flowers, groves lush with aspen and willow. The company felt stronger now that there was new “blood,” for the recently added members were strong and healthy. But Matthew Lively was filled with misgivings; something was wrong and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He wondered if his mother’s dark and terrible prophecy were the cause of it. But he kept his doubts to himself. Everyone else seemed to think Tice had a good idea and spirits were high.

The idyll did not last long.

After the first few pleasant days of travel, the wagon train came to the Wasatch Mountains, a range of high, snowcapped peaks and deep canyons. The sides of the canyons were clogged with willow, dense berry bushes, thick cottonwoods, box elder, and alder trees, and the riverbeds were narrow and full of boulders. It called for every able-bodied male in the company to help clear the route.

Armed with hatchets and axes, chains and spades, they fought and hacked their way through willow, cottonwoods, aspen, and box elder. Each night the men fell exhausted on their blankets while their women nursed their husbands’, brothers’, and sons’ blisters and scrapes with ointments and words of encouragement. At least they had water, Tice pointed out, and grass for cattle. But they also had swarms of mosquitoes and biting flies.

Progressing only five miles a day, they were finally forced to double-team the oxen in order to haul the wagons over the Wasatch summit, and when they descended to the other side, the emigrants stared at the formidable obstacle that lay before them: the Great Salt Lake Desert.

Night camps were less cheerful now and wrapped in sober silence. Travel during the day was slow going, for temperatures soared and roasted the desert. Injuries incurred in the Wasatch mountains held up travel as there were fewer able men to hitch and unhitch the oxen, and frequent rest stops were needed. While the women worried over their menfolk—Joe Strickland’s foot started to fester although Emmeline did her best to take care of it—Amos Tice harbored a secret worry of his own: that they were falling behind schedule. Up ahead lay the Sierras and the threat of snow.

Across the barren lake bed they trudged as a merciless sun pounded down. As the heat grew searing and ovenlike, the emigrants believed they had entered a new hell. They bathed the animals’ tongues with wet towels for so waterless and devoid of the slightest moisture was this arid land they feared the oxen and cattle would go mad from thirst. It was a desolate alkali wasteland where not a living thing could be seen. The wagons up ahead looked gigantic through the magnifying heat waves. The mountains in the distance seemed to float on air. The midday sun was like a hammer. Vulcan’s forge, the more educated among the party thought. At sunset shadows stretched for miles. The night air was like cold tongs pinching through blankets. Children cried, cattle moaned. The surface of the plain was so compact that the animals’ hooves left but little impression in the hard salt and alkaline crust, but when the wagons reached the center of the desert, they found a shallow lake that turned the alkali into mush. Now it was like walking through oatmeal. Each footfall requiring effort to pull the next foot out of the mire. The gluey muck covered their feet like cement casts, it clumped around wagon wheels and made oxen stumble.

Still the emigrants tramped on through the furnace, parched, sweating with heat. Joe Strickland’s foot got worse. As infection and fever ravaged the poor man’s body, Emmeline rode in the Hammersmiths’ wagon with Joe’s head cradled in her lap. Other members were now likewise ailing, but they knew they had to keep going, that it meant death to stop.

A group of men, elected by the others, announced to Tice their intention to go to the Mormons for help (although no one had any idea exactly where Brigham Young’s people had settled), but Tice, knowing he had a bad reputation among the Latter-day Saints, declared authoritatively that they were too far out of the way and it would be suicide to try even to search for them.

Onward they went, through the scalding heat of the day and the bone-crunching cold of night, lips cracked and bleeding, tongues swollen, water doled out in spoonfuls. The Schumann brothers’ oxen finally gave out, dropping to their knees and bellowing with thirst. So the four Germans buried their plows and farm implements right there in the sand with the intention of coming back for them after they found land in Oregon.

The Biggs’s new baby, delivered three months prior by Albertina Hopkins, succumbed to the heat and was buried in the sand. The Benbows’ chickens began to drop with heat and thirst, and even Daisy, the otherwise excitable coon dog, drooped alongside Sean Flaherty’s wagon.

They thought the Great Salt Lake Desert would never end.

But it finally did, and as the weary wagon train drew up to the first watering hole in the foothills, as the hot day gave way to cool evening, as cattle stampeded to the water and people tried not to get trampled in the rush, and as Matthew Lively was thinking that this was the dark and terrible trial prophesied by his mother, Emmeline came to him and said, “Joe Strickland has gangrene. His foot is going to have to be amputated.”

Matthew suddenly felt as if he carried the weight of the world and all its populations on his shoulders. Sinking to the ground, where he had been trying to start a campfire, he shook his head and said, “I cannot do it.”

Emmeline sat next to him and laid a hand on his arm. Like herself, like all the others, Matthew’s face was red and blistered, his eyes bleary, his clothes stiff with sweat and grime. “I’ll help you,” she said. “I once assisted my father in the amputation of a leg. I am not squeamish, Dr. Lively.”

He looked at her and felt like crying. “Miss Fitzsimmons, I am not a doctor.”

She stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I am not a medical man. You made that assumption back in Independence, and I did not correct you.”

She frowned. “Then what are you?”

His voice was small and weary as he said, “I am an undertaker.”

She blinked. Her frown deepened. “An undertaker? Like a mortician?”

“Exactly like a mortician.”

“But…your medical bag—”

“The tools of a man who heals bodies are the same as those of a man who lays bodies to eternal rest. Especially when the demise was caused by injury. We have to do the same sewing and bandaging as any doctor. And the stethoscope—that is how we can know for sure the man is dead before he goes into the ground.”

“But I saw you buying medicine in the apothecary shop!”

“It was for myself. I have a chest weakness in the winter.”

Emmeline was so flabbergasted she could barely speak. “Why did you not correct me? Why did you let everyone believe you are a doctor?”

He gave her a woebegone look. “If you had a group of people depending on you for their lives, would
you
tell them you were a mortician? Miss Fitzsimmons, you have been complaining of prejudice and stigma because of your gender. Well I face the same prejudice and stigma—because of my profession.”

Emmeline’s expression grew thoughtful. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I see your point.”

“I make people uncomfortable,” he said miserably. “I remind them of something they’d rather not be reminded of. But it’s our family business! My father is a mortician, and so are my two brothers. I had no choice but to follow them.”

“My dear Matthew,” she said gently, addressing him for the first time by his Christian name. “Do not be ashamed and embarrassed of the profession your father taught you for there is nothing shameful about what you do. It is an honorable profession, a necessary job, and people need men like you who are respectful of the dead, and of the grieving, because I have seen how you are when someone dies. My father and uncles told me of morticians robbing corpses and cheating the families, undertakers selling families caskets they can’t afford, preying upon their grief and guilt. You can make a difference, Matthew, and fulfill a very important need because you are called upon during one of the most dire and vulnerable moments in a human life.”

He could only stare at her, and recall Honoria’s words when she rejected his marriage proposal: “I could never live with a man who dealt with diseased bodies.”

“So…my profession doesn’t bother you?”

“I would be the worst of hypocrites if it did. I made my decision to go west when I saw how steeped in prejudice and outmoded tradition the east is. People are squeezed into molds and expected to stay in them. I wanted to be a doctor but all anyone could say to me was that women were meant to be wives and mothers. So I decided to go where thinking is free and unhampered by blind bias. Now what sort of feminist would I be if I demanded open-mindedness of others and did not hold that same open mind myself?”

“And you don’t think”—he cleared his throat and his cheeks reddened—“That there is a problem with my name? I would prefer not to change it.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then, understanding, said, “Oh!” and her hand flew to her mouth.

“So you see not only will I be a pariah, I’ll be a laughingstock, too.”

She smiled. “The name doesn’t bother your father, does it? So it should not bother you.”

“It’s different,” he said unhappily. “In Boston, the Livelys have been morticians for generations. Ever since the original colonists. No one gives the name a second thought. But out here. Can an undertaker named Lively expect to gain respect?”

Emmeline granted it could be a problem, but now was not the time to worry about Matthew Lively’s name. Joe Strickland was going to die if something wasn’t done to save his leg.

They went back to the Hammersmiths’ wagon and although Joe Strickland had been unconscious for two days, he opened his eyes and, in one of those moments of clarity that sometimes come to a man on the threshold of death, said, “I appreciate what you done for me, Doc, and while I know you just want to help me, I can’t let you take my leg. I’ve been driving livestock since I left my mother’s knee. Don’t know nothing else. And there ain’t nothing more useless than a one-legged muleskinner. So I’ll say my good-byes now, if you don’t mind.”

Joe died that night but no one blamed Matthew—they said he had done his best. Emmeline discovered a new admiration for Matthew Lively that night, because though it pained his conscience to keep his profession a secret, he put other people’s feelings before his own. She kept his secret and continued to call him Dr. Lively.

As for Matthew himself, in the weeks to come he would look back on this night and realize that this was the instant he had fallen in love.

They plodded onward. More oxen collapsed on the salt flats and cattle wandered off in search of water. Four more wagons were abandoned as family members buried goods they could no longer carry, intending to come back for them someday. Into the barren ground went trunks of clothes and keepsakes, family heirlooms and quilts, butter churns and frying pans. The emigrants had devised different ways, during the journey from Independence, for keeping their money safe. Some simply packed it away in trunks with other possessions, but some drilled holes in the wagon planks and secreted coins in there. Silas Winslow had a special tin box labeled, “Caustic chemical! Will cause instant burning of the eyes and skin if opened.” Here was where he had hidden all his coins. Having to abandon his wagon now, and all his cumbersome photographic equipment, he strapped the heavy gold-filled tin to his back.

There was a sense of urgency in the party. They had lost days in the fruitless search for the lost cattle, summer was waning, snow now crowned nearby peaks, provisions were getting low, and they were still facing hundreds of miles of Nevada desert.

Once out of the Utah wasteland they encountered mountainous country. From a high pass they could see another desert valley, and beyond that another mountain range, with another valley beyond it. This was the topography of Nevada: a rhythm of valley and range, valley and range, stretching from salt desert to the Sierras, each valley a desert, each range a wall. And there was nothing for the emigrants to do but put one foot in front of the other and hope that the last of the oxen held out.

They entered Paiute Indian country where raiding was a way of life. Cattle were stolen during the night, horses snared in broad daylight. And as the number of oxen diminished, more wagons had to be abandoned. The majority of the members were now walking, having left most of their possessions behind. Youngsters doubled up riding on horses while remaining provisions were piled into the last of the wagons.

More of Charlie Benbow’s chickens perished but he still had some good breeding stock left and he guarded them day and night. The Hopkins daughter who got married at South Pass came privately to Emmeline with a complaint of pains. As the girl was four months pregnant, Emmeline was alarmed. But she hid her fear and gave the girl a soothing tonic. Sean Flaherty still had his dog Daisy but fewer potatoes with which to start his Oregon farm. And Osgood Aahrens lost all his barber tools in a bog. When the party finally began the trek up along the winding Truckee River, the remaining cattle were gaunt and stumbling over rocks, the people weak and malnourished with supplies dangerously low, and when they finally saw the Sierra Nevada, the range was cloaked in dark, ominous clouds.

In the third week of October the exhausted party straggled into a broad mountain valley where they found snow swirling among the pines. Here they regrouped and rested, making camp as best they could. But they awoke the next dawn to a light snowfall and realized they must hasten their ascent of the Sierra summit, on the other side of which lay California.

Five days later they reached a mountain lake, beyond which lay the pass through the Sierras. They tried to cross but snow thwarted their efforts, forcing them to retreat to the shore of the lake, where there was level ground, timber, and the prospect of game. Here they built makeshift shelters constructed from tents, quilts, buffalo robes, and brush. One hundred fifty nine people huddled in the crude dwellings, hoping that the early snow would melt and they would be able to cross the pass. While they waited and prayed, they made an accounting of all that they had, and found they still had a few wagons with cattle and horses, and some provisions: beans, flour, coffee, and sugar. It was decided that everything would be pooled, including the Benbows’ chickens and Sean Flaherty’s potatoes, and distributed equally among the families.