The Devil's Paintbox (5 page)

“Mr. Jackson.” Aiden walked toward him. Jackson stopped and squinted over at him.

“Oh. You.” He gave a racking wet cough, churned up something thick and spat.

“Just want to say I can keep myself alive well enough,” Aiden said. “I don't need you putting fifty cents to any doctor on my account.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“The doc—the foreign doctor said you gave him fifty cents to tend me last night. I am sorry that I got myself sick, but I want to get it straight with you about the money part before we go on.”

Jackson wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I thought fifty cents might be fair. I know what doctoring costs.”

“I would've made do.”

“Well, I'm sure you're right.”

“It's just I know how bosses will pile it up on you. The owing. You work and work and then comes payday but the money is all gone to rent and goods at the company store, which is three times the normal price, and suddenly there's nothing left. I won't have it. Sorry. But I won't. We worked the coal mines between Virginia and here. Stone quarry too, same bad deal.”

Jackson rubbed a hand across his tired eyes. “Well. That's a whole lot of woeful history for my brain first thing in the morning.”

“I just mean to be straight, sir,” Aiden said. “To be up-front about things. Anything goes on my account, I need to agree to it first.”

“Fair enough. I promise in the future I'll consult you, son. If you're not passed out and twitching in the dirt like a stepped-on lizard like you were last night!” Jackson snapped. “Now will you let me go do my business ‘fore I crap my own pants?”

Aiden jumped. “Yes. Sorry.”

“And so you know,” Jackson growled. “No fifty cents on your account. That doc turned back the money.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Said not to mind it. He's gone a little crazy in the mind, I think, on account of the war, but that's what he said, no charge, so why would I argue against that?”

“So no money charged to me?”

“Not one penny. But you better calm down your attitude
or I'll start chargin’ you for sheer annoyance.” Jackson pulled himself up and stretched a little. “Boy—you're spending a lot of energy being mad and turned-up over everything. I know you ain't had the best of it before now, but all you can do is go on from here. So my advice, and I won't charge a penny for it, is that you go easy.”

ne week and a hundred miles later, the ever-gregarious Maddy knew the life story of just about everybody in the wagon train. “People come from everywhere!” she told Aiden as they walked along one bright afternoon. “From Boston and New York and even Sweden. Annie and Polly Hollingford, those fancy-dressed girls? They come from a plantation in South Carolina,” Maddy chatted on, swiping hair off her sweaty forehead. “But they've been living in St. Louis for the war. Their uncle is sending the whole family to Seattle to build a factory for canning salmon. Like canned peaches!” she explained, as if her brother were dim and hadn't heard about canning. She stopped to pick up a buffalo chip and add it to the pile in her sack. Most of the older children spent the days gathering the dried buffalo dung that made their nightly cooking fires. They fanned out on either side of the wagon train, filling burlap sacks and dragging them back to empty them whenever they got too heavy.

Aiden usually kept to the far outside of the group, his bow slung over one shoulder, the quiver of arrows on the other. Twenty-seven wagons and a hundred and eight people scared off most living things, but out here he might hunt up a few rabbits or prairie chickens. He was still feeble enough that he needed Maddy's help to string the bow at the start
of each day, but he could draw well enough to kill small game.

He was starting to feel at ease in the wagon train, though he knew he would never fit in as easily as his sister. There were four other “strays” like him, traveling on Jefferson J. Jackson's ticket to work as loggers. Two of the other men were in their twenties, friends from eastern Kansas seeking adventure in the West. Another man was a widower of thirty-two who had left his three children behind with his sister. The fourth was a big man named William Buck. He talked a lot, mostly about all the great things he had done, most of which Aiden thought pretty suspicious. Buck fussed like a child when he didn't get his way and bullied the others, though in the sneaky way of a coward. They all shared meals and slept under Jackson's wagons when it rained, but Aiden didn't feel like any of them would be his lifelong friend. The Kansas boys kept their own company, the widower was too morose and William Buck just plain got on his nerves. So far, the men had light work. They took turns driving Jackson's two wagons, which carried their meager personal gear, food for the six of them and Jackson's store of trade goods. They helped with the cattle, hunted game and dug the latrines for the camp. They took turns standing guard during the night.

Maddy was still staying in the Reverend True's wagon, and it seemed that it would be her permanent home. The Trues had sheltered her the first few days out of charity, but that soon changed.

The Reverend Gabriel and Marguerite True appeared to have no idea of the simplest housekeeping tasks one needed to survive in general, let alone in a wagon train crossing the
continent. Marguerite had never even seen a campfire, certainly never cooked over one. She had a book called
The Pioneers’ Guide to the Oregon Trail
that told how to bake biscuits in a Dutch oven, but she didn't even know how to make biscuit dough. “A minister's wife has so many other duties to attend to,” Marguerite explained vaguely. The first time Aiden brought her a pheasant he had shot, she took great delight in the beautiful feathers, apparently without realizing there was actual meat under the hat decorations.

And so the misplaced pair was completely willing to let a thirteen-year-old girl take over their care. Maddy built the fires, cooked the meals, plucked the pheasants, carried water and mended the reverend's clothes. He tore something every other day, for he was as awkward with the ox and wagon as his wife was with the domestic chores. There was barely enough room in the little wagon for the couple to sleep, so Marguerite piled up a nest of quilts underneath each night for Maddy.

“Those quilts smell so good, Aiden,” she said as she picked up another buffalo chip. “Everything in her chest smells of perfume.”

Aiden also slept outside, though the blankets Jackson provided were not so plush and hardly perfumed. He didn't mind. He liked falling asleep under the stars. After just this one week of simple food, corn bread and porridge and salt pork, Aiden was starting to feel strong in a way he could barely remember. Jackson led them to creeks or springs each day, so there were wild greens to be had, which quickly cured his bleeding gums. The aches in his knees and shoulders were almost gone too; so much for the scurvy. Maddy's face
was filling out and there was color in her cheeks. The skin around her fingernails, which had been split and bleeding all winter, was now smooth. She looked like a girl who might even be pretty someday.

“Oh, and listen,” Maddy went on as she slung the bag over her shoulder. “You know those Thompsons? In the two blue painted wagons, with all those children? They have no dead ones at all! Isn't that amazing? Ten alive—Therese, Peter, John, Joseph, Rose, Paul, Monica, Matthew, Catherine and Andrew. Not even any born dead!”

“There's only ten?” Aiden laughed. Children swarmed around those two wagons like a mess of tadpoles. It really was amazing, though. Aiden didn't know of a single family, even rich people back east, whose children had all lived. Two out of three was thought lucky.

He saw Doc Carlos walking alone up ahead. Aiden had not talked to him since the first morning they'd met. Carlos hardly spoke to anyone. He traveled with a man named Joby, and the two of them always camped some distance from the rest.

“What do you know about him?” Aiden asked, nodding in the doctor's direction.

“Nothing much except that he hates dogs.” Maddy frowned. “The Thompsons’ dog—you know, that spotted hound—was just sniffing round his feet and he went and kicked it clear into yesterday.”

“That isn't much to know.”

“I tried to talk to him. I asked him could I read his medical books, but he didn't seem like he was even hearing me.”

“What about his friend? The one that drives the cart?” Carlos didn't have a proper wagon, just a two-wheeled cart pulled by a pair of mules.

“That man Joby? Likes to talk well enough but has a brain deficiency.”

“Like a slow mind? Like the shopkeeper's boy was?”

“Not bad as that. Just off some. He injured his brain in the war. He's really good with the animals, though. He shows Reverend True how to work the oxen. And I tell him things about the world. Mostly he wants to know about the animals—do they have mules in China and so on. He was very enamored with the llamas of Peru.”

Maddy stopped to pick up two buffalo patties. Her sack was bulging and Aiden took it from her. A warm breeze ruffled through the tall grass with a low swishing sound. Grasshoppers jumped all around them like popping corn. Aiden still sometimes had to hold back from catching them. Maddy went on about all the people in the wagon train. He didn't mind her endless chatter; it was comforting, the only thing the same from their old lives. It was a beautiful day, the first of May, with the sky so blue it almost hurt to look at. He felt strange, and it took him a while to realize why. He felt strange because he felt happy.

“See them there?” Maddy pointed at an older couple. “They've been married twenty years, and they're going to run a sawmill in Seattle for her brother who got pulled into a machine. He lost parts of both his arms and almost his entire head, just enough left to keep his brain in. Will you not work with the machines, Aiden? When we get there? Please promise.”

“Yes. If you'll please to God ease off the holding-in-the-brain kind of talk.”

“I bet he looks like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, all stitched together!” Maddy giggled.

“Stop!”

She made a gruesome face at him and ran her finger in a harsh zigzag down one side of her skull. Aiden lunged at her and she darted away. She screeched with laughter as he chased her through the grass.

hat day Jackson decided to make camp earlier than usual. He figured they were about in the middle of Kansas and making good time. They were following the Smoky Hill River, but it was about to swing away into a big curve for about ten miles. The wagons would keep on traveling in a straight line the next day so they would camp before the bend to have water for the night. It was three o'clock and the sun was warm. The women decided it was a good chance to do some washing. Soon the afternoon rang with laughter and singing. Children splashed in the shallow water as the women beat clothes clean on the rocks. The men were banished to the high ground so the women could bathe, and the air filled with shrieks as they waded into the cold water. The men kept themselves busy mending harnesses and shoring up the wagons.