Trail Angel (11 page)

“I brought tea,” Mrs. Rutledge announced, leaving no doubt who was now in charge of the Colonel's care. “I gave him a honey and vinegar mix for the cough. We need to get liquids in him—and I don't mean spirits,” she added, glancing to the Colonel.

“He won't drink any more water,” Byron said.

“I would rather die from fever than from you drowning me.” The Colonel cursed in a hoarse whisper until Mrs. Rutledge silenced him with a cup of tea. Josey took the old man's fractiousness as a good sign. Had he been suffering cholera, the Colonel would have been a more docile patient.

When Annabelle returned that afternoon with more tea, she found the Colonel and Byron dozing beneath their makeshift tents while Josey Angel and her mother sat together beneath a canvas tarp he had rigged for shade and a windscreen.

The sight of Josey Angel speaking to her mother like they were kin stopped her. The windscreen blocked their view of Annabelle's approach, yet she heard every word.

“He's like a father to you,” her mother said. She watched Josey eat as if he were one of her boys. They would have been close in age. As loud and lively as her brothers had been, Annabelle didn't see much of them in Josey Angel. They did have the war in common, and Annabelle would never know how it affected her brothers. She wondered if Josey had always been as he was now.
Would
his
mother recognize him?

Josey Angel said something between bites of biscuit. Feeling guilty for listening, Annabelle thought to call out, but then her mother asked about his parents.

Annabelle crouched to her knees.

“They're good people.” Josey bit into another biscuit.

“When did you last see them?”

“When I left for war.”

“Did you part on bad terms?”

“No.”

Her mother had a way of using silence to make a person say more than they intended. The trick had always worked better on the boys than it had on Annabelle. After a pause when it seemed Josey Angel would say no more, he added, “It's been so long, I almost forget what she looks like.”

I should bring the tea before it gets cold.
Josey and her mother sat without speaking, and Annabelle lingered another moment, listening to the music created by the rush of the wind across the tarp and the flute-like call of an unseen meadowlark.

As they returned to the wagons, Annabelle confessed her eavesdropping to her mother. They hadn't stayed long, wanting to give Josey Angel opportunity for a nap while the Colonel slept. He spoke of his plans to lead the train the following day, and not even her mother could object to leaving the Colonel and Byron once he explained his reasoning.

If she hadn't heard it, Annabelle wouldn't have believed how freely Josey Angel spoke with her mother. She remembered a stray cat that used to come around their house. Just children then, Annabelle and her brothers tried to feed the cat, but they were too boisterous to lure it close enough to be petted. The cat sensed danger even in their good intentions and maintained its distance.

On a day when the boys were away, Annabelle spied her mother feeding scraps to the cat. Through a window, she watched her mother squat on the porch, a morsel of chicken pinched between her fingers. The cat took a step toward her and stopped. Then another silent padded footfall. The cat crept closer, its body tensed for flight, but her mother held her place, long past the point her knees must have ached, until the cat came to her, took the food from her fingers and, as it chewed, allowed her mother to scratch the fur between its ears. A few more bites and the cat rubbed its bristled face against her mother's hand.

She never reached to it. Her mother accepted only what intimacy the cat permitted. Her mother laughed when Annabelle told her Josey Angel reminded her of the cat.

“It's not the first time I've had a secret rendezvous with our young guide,” she said, enjoying Annabelle's reaction. “I was as surprised as you look now,” her mother said, explaining their first meeting had come before daybreak one morning when her mother had been unable to sleep. Just as Annabelle had once found the Colonel, her mother found Josey Angel stirring up their cook fire.

“Would you have guessed he prefers warm milk to coffee? The Smiths permitted it to him, so long as he milked their cow.”

“Mother, get on with the story,” Annabelle said, resisting an urge to shake her. “What did you talk about?”

The joy fell from her mother's face. “We talked about the war, of course.” Annabelle had to coax the rest of the story from her mother, who confessed she couldn't look at Josey Angel without seeing her boys.

Annabelle thought to change the subject. Her mother almost hadn't recovered from their deaths. The oldest, named Langdon after her father, had died from fever on a hospital sickbed nearly four years earlier in a little town in Maryland. Her brother Johnny wrote the letter home. For four days, her mother's only comfort on receiving the news of one son's death was the belief that the other still drew breath and would return to her. Then they read in the newspapers about the battle at Sharpsburg. They found Johnny's name in the published list of dead. A soldier's letter followed, assuring them Johnny had “a good death,” but it proved no comfort to her mother.

Their walk brought them near the campsite. Annabelle led her mother to the edge of a creek that fed into the river. They found a round boulder by the water's edge big enough to serve as a seat for both.

It struck her that she and her mother never talked about their grief. They didn't talk about so many things. Each carried so much pain, sharing with the other felt like you were adding to that person's load. It was easier to hold it in. Yet hearing her mother talk now didn't add to Annabelle's grief. If anything, it lessened the burden, like two oxen yoked to the same cart.

“I knew
everything
about those boys, at least until the end.
I
nursed their first wounds.
I
taught them their letters.
I
brought them to peace when they fought.”

Annabelle remained silent as her mother explained her frustration. Letters from the boys were filled with queries about the most trivial news from home and empty reassurances about their well-being.

Their last time home, on leave the year before they were killed, they went with their father to his study to discuss the war, as if their mother were an Eve in the Garden to be shielded from knowledge. “I nearly burst in on them, calling them out as imposters, those
gentlemen
who not so very long before had come bawling to me when they lost a game to their sister.”

Her mother drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Until the end, there wasn't a day I didn't feel a part of the boys' lives. I knew that wouldn't last, but I looked forward to seeing my boys grow into men. Husbands. Fathers.”

Her mother never knew what manner of men war made her boys. Nothing in her imagination helped her understand a war where so many died or came home mangled. The casualty figures reported in newspapers seemed unfathomable—twenty-three thousand killed or wounded or missing at Sharpsburg, a figure equal to at least half the population of Charleston. Annabelle tried to picture the city with half its people gone, but it was beyond her imagining.

That failure to understand prompted her mother's question to Josey Angel the morning they talked by the fire. “Why do men feel they must protect women from a knowledge of war?” She expected him to evade the question. Instead, perhaps because he wasn't her son, he spoke to her with a candor her sons couldn't.

“Are you certain it's you they protect?” he said, staring into the fire as if an answer lay amid the ash.

“I don't understand.”

Josey Angel raised his head, looked at her mother as he spoke. “I went to war expecting excitement, memories that would sate my pride in my old age. Now I can't escape them. I'll never be rid of them.”

The camp stirred. He made to rise but stopped even before her mother bid him to stay. “There's this, too,” he said, seeming to stare past her. “So long as you don't know the things I've done, in your eyes, at least, I'm still the boy you knew.”

As Annabelle listened to the story, she thought at first her mother misspoke.
Did Mother hear the words as her Johnny might have said them? Or did the Union soldier speak them as he would to
his
mother?

“He's a good man, Anna. I can see that in him.”

Her mother rose to leave, her long legs quickly covering the ground to camp. Annabelle followed, turning over the conversation in her head. Her mother's grief had always been greater than her own, and Annabelle feared her mother saw a son where another man stood. That man was a killer, their well-being in his hands. Annabelle hoped her mother was right.

Caleb halted his team with a sharp call and a crack of the whip. The oxen were more than accommodating. Big brutes never moved faster than a man could walk—but they did it while pulling a six-ton wagon across almost any terrain.

Driving a prairie schooner pulled by three yoke of oxen wasn't the same as a stagecoach or buckboard. Wagons were easy on roads with a team of horses. Occasionally travelers in a stage or converted farm wagon drawn by horses passed their train. Caleb had even seen a couple of handcarts pushed by Mormons headed to the Great Salt Lake. They could travel like that on the emigrant trail. After decades of use, Caleb had never seen a better natural road.

The land was level, the ground hard and the road nearly as straight as what a city planner would draw on a map. One of the Yankees had a viameter, which ticked off each revolution of a wheel and calculated the distance traveled. They averaged twenty miles on good days. They wouldn't make that much once they left the plains and headed into the mountains or when they crossed badlands with scarce water and little grass. Caleb wouldn't want to be pushing no handcart then, though at least that would be better than a broken coach or a wagon with worn-out horses.

With the oxen stopped, Caleb threw the brake lever and went to find out what caused the delay. A wagon train is a frustrating mode of travel for a man in a hurry. Wagons can only go as fast as the slowest among them. The miners spoke often of going off on their own. The only thing stopping them was the guides' promise of a shortcut. No matter how fast they traveled, the miners wouldn't beat the farmers and shopkeepers to Virginia City if they had to cross the Rocky Mountains.

As he strode toward the front of the line, Caleb saw Josey Angel riding by on his gray Indian pony.
Come to play the hero.
With the old man gone Company Q and the cuffy playing nursemaid, Josey Angel acted like the settlers couldn't yoke their oxen without his telling them how. He still rode ahead some to check their path, but then Caleb would see him riding alongside the wagons, keeping everybody on pace, tossing orders like he knew something. The boy probably didn't know the first thing about wagons.
I would like to see him drive a team.

Josey Angel dismounted and joined a cluster of men around the back of Willis Daggett's wagon. Rutledge was there with his brother-in-law, the Daggett boys, Smith and Brewster. The crowd obscured Caleb's view, but the wagon tilted to the side so badly he didn't need a wheelwright to figure the problem.
Ah, hell. This ain't good.

Rutledge saw him coming. “Oh, good, you're here.” Caleb liked that, adding in his mind,
Finally, someone who knows what he's doing.
“Can you fix it?”

The wheel was busted up. A couple of the spokes had shattered, others fallen loose and the wooden rim had come apart from the iron tire. Caleb wasn't surprised. Even with the hardwood used for wagons and wheels, the wood shrank in the dry air. Caleb had told Rutledge the drivers should soak the wheels in the river every couple of days to protect against shrinking. If the wagon master knew anything about wagons, he'd be telling everyone that. Caleb looked down at Josey Angel, his face as smooth as a woman's, and wondered if the others were smart enough to realize this was his fault.

“Fix it with what? You got an extra wheel lying around?” Caleb already knew the answer. He had told Rutledge they should bring extra wagon parts, but the moneygrubber didn't want to take up valuable cargo space on stuff he couldn't sell in Montana. He brought one extra wheel—which he had sold a few days into the journey when a wheel on one of the Yankee's wagons gave out. Rutledge had been quick to turn a profit when he had the chance, leaving Caleb to wonder what that wheel was worth now that one of Rutledge's wagons had broken down.

Rutledge turned to Josey Angel and asked about Fort Kearny. “Might there be a wheelwright there or at least a smith with extra wheels for sale?”

“I'm sure there's something.” Frowning, Josey Angel removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his head with his sleeve. “We might be a couple days out still.”

“You're not certain?” Caleb looked to the others, making plain that a scout ought to know.

“I'm not,” Josey Angel said. “I haven't been ranging as far as I normally do and no wagons have passed us coming the other way today.”

“You can't fashion a new wheel from spare parts?” Smith asked Rutledge.

He can't fashion anything.
Caleb stood tall as everyone looked to him for the answer. “What spare parts? We're using all the wheels we've got.”

The men set in to discussing how “we” might fashion parts from extra wood. Caleb liked how they used a collective term when they meant him. He cut off the conversation before they wasted more time. “You need wheelwright's tools to do any of that. Anybody got wheelwright's tools?”

Again, Caleb already knew the answer. Josey Angel had been quiet through the discussion, more proof that he knew nothing of practical value. When he finally spoke, Caleb expected to dismiss whatever he said out of hand.