Trail Angel (13 page)

“Yes, I—” Annabelle had been asked such questions before and had a prepared answer. Studying Julia's face, seeing her pale blue eyes filled with compassion rather than judgment, Annabelle stopped herself. “I lost my baby,” she said, so softly she almost couldn't hear the words.

Julia came to her, moving across the cramped wagon with practiced ease, arms around her like a sister. Now Annabelle cried. Julia held her until she sensed Annabelle was cried out, saying the sort of things mothers say to soothe their little ones. Feeling ridiculous, Annabelle pulled back to wipe her eyes, Julia offering a handkerchief from the pocket of her calico dress. “I'm being silly. You are the one with reason to shed tears.”

“You are still young,” Julia said. “You will marry again and—”

Annabelle shook her head, swallowed back tears. “The doctor said . . .” She choked on the rest, unable to voice the diagnosis she had shared with no one, not even her family. Her mother believed Annabelle showed no interest in another husband because she still mourned the first. Annabelle couldn't bring herself to tell her mother the truth, knowing no man—at least none worth having—would want a barren woman.

Julia embraced her again. “I'm so sorry.”

At camp that night, Josey filled his plate at their cook fire and tried to slip away as he usually did.

Annabelle's mother wouldn't have it.

“Josef, you can't imagine you've fulfilled your duties as wagon master if you think you can run off into the darkness like a thief.”

Josey looked so much like a boy caught stealing cookies from his mother's kitchen that Annabelle burst out. She needed a good laugh after her talk with Julia Brewster. Josey mumbled something about watching the stock, but her mother told him her father had put the Daggett boys to the task.

“We can't have you so tuckered out tomorrow you don't know which way is west,” Annabelle's aunt Blanche chided.

“Besides,” her mother added, “it's part of the wagon master's duties to entertain us. The Colonel always tells us a story.”

From Josey's reaction, Annabelle figured facing the whole Sioux nation presented a more appealing prospect. Before he objected, Mark and Jimmy called out their assent. The Colonel's stories, even those about torture and murder, were too bloodless for their tastes. They hoped for something more ghastly from a notorious gunman.

“I'm no storyteller,” Josey said.

Caroline chimed in. “You can always give us a song.”

Josey looked more ready to face the Sioux
and
the Comanche than fulfill that request.

“Maybe you can read us some Shakespeare,” Annabelle said. The boys made known their dissatisfaction with this suggestion.

“Do you have a book?” Josey asked.

Annabelle shook her head. “Guess you will have to sing after all.”

Everyone had filled their plates and found seats around the fire, all looking at Josey, who shuffled his feet in the dust. The men had been passing around a bottle. Annabelle's uncle Luke offered it to Josey, who sniffed it and passed it on.

“For goodness' sake, somebody find him a seat,” her mother said.

Luke gave up the box he had been sitting on and went to find another. Josey sat down gingerly, as if he expected to find a scorpion coiled on the wood.

“Please, Josey, tell us a story,” Jimmy urged.

Mark picked up the thread, his eyes alight. “You were in Kansas, weren't you? Bleeding Kansas?”

“I won't tell you about Kansas.” Josey fell quiet a minute, his eyes drawn to the fire. About the time Annabelle thought the boys had silenced him for the night, he cleared his throat and spoke so softly she wouldn't have heard him if she hadn't been holding her breath.

“ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,' ” he said quickly, as if embarrassed by the sound of his voice. His eyes cast toward the ground, he continued.

“ ‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

“ ‘And all that's best of dark and bright

“ ‘Meet in her aspect and her eyes.' ”

Jimmy groaned. “Is this a
love
poem?”

Before he finished the first stanza, Annabelle recognized it and smiled. Josey looked at her, his coffee eyes warm in the fire's glow, and she looked away. He lost his voice a moment, then resumed.

The others remained quiet. Only the boys, bored, continued eating. Caroline sat with her mouth hanging open so that Annabelle feared her cousin might catch a mosquito along with her meal. Her parents, Luke, Blanche and Caleb had different reactions. Annabelle noticed them looking between her and Josey, as if watching the flight of a ball between throwers. Annabelle shifted in her seat, trying to ignore them. Josey gazed into the fire, as if the words lay there, hidden among the embers.

He looked up when he recited a line about “every raven tress,” his eyes meeting Annabelle's. Feeling her face flush, Annabelle looked to her feet, but she knew the others were watching.

On completing the poem, Josey bowed his head as the women applauded and a few men whistled their appreciation. “Is he done yet?” Jimmy asked, drawing a rebuke from his mother.

Annabelle clapped politely, careful not to look Josey's way. She heard her mother say, “That was beautiful.” Blanche agreed. “I know I've heard it before, but I can't place it. Who is the author?”

“Lord Byron,” Annabelle answered.

“The
Sambo
wrote it?” Caleb blurted.

Annabelle laughed, the tension she had been feeling released. “No, the
English
Lord Byron.”

“Oh,” he said, his thick features twisted in confusion. “That's quite a coincidence.”

Annabelle enjoyed her laugh and didn't even mind when she looked up from the flames to see Josey watching her. This time there was no doubt: the blank-faced boy she had first seen was smiling, whether from relief or joy didn't matter in the moment.

Willis Daggett called out Josey's name, breaking the spell. In a moment he came among them, breathless and wild-eyed. “You better come,” he said between pants. “Riders coming.”

Josey was up in a moment, his rifle in hand, though Annabelle hadn't even seen it near him. “How many?”

“Two. I think. It's awful dark.”

Annabelle's eyes found Josey's.
Two?
He allowed himself another smile, and Annabelle shared it. Clifton Daggett arrived a moment later to confirm her suspicion. “Lookee who I've found,” he said, walking in ahead of the shadowed riders.

A cheer from everyone around the fire quickly drew the attention of the other wagons, and in a moment well-wishers surrounded the Colonel. He still looked pitifully weak, especially after what must have been a long ride.

“Your campfires guided us in,” he said over the clamor. “Nice of you to wait up for us.”

It seemed twenty different people started in on twenty different versions of the news from the last couple of days. If not for her mother finding him a place to sit and a plate to fill his hands, the Colonel might have collapsed again. Almost forgotten in the shadow of the crowd stood Lord Byron, his gap-toothed smile beaming through the day's dust. Josey went to him, a hand on his shoulder the only demonstration between them. Annabelle hung back a step, not wanting to intrude, but Byron's deep bass carried to where she stood.

“Them riders are back. Think they was following us.”

Annabelle wanted to ask what they were talking about, but Josey's tone held her back.

“They're coming for us,” Josey said.

“They ain't leaving.”

“Maybe we should go see them first.”

Morning broke with a golden light on the horizon as Annabelle and Caroline carried buckets and the breakfast dishes to a stream feeding clear water into the Platte. While Caroline squatted behind a shrub to relieve herself, Annabelle paused, squinting against the day's first brightness. The grass grew thick near the water, and each blade glittered with dewdrops, transformed by the sun into an endless paradise of diamonds.

Caroline, who always had a streak of poetry in her, seemed to read her thoughts. “Look, Annabelle. It shines so prettily, it's as if every sorrow is behind us.”

Annabelle agreed. She had never considered herself especially attuned to the natural world, but the more she traveled, the more she became aware of it, whether it be a kaleidoscope of wildflowers or a field of grass vast as an ocean. She relished the prospect of seeing mountains so great they were capped with snow even in summer.

Having traveled almost a score of days, they were nearing Fort Kearny, their last chance to get mail, buy fittings for broken wagons and other supplies before reaching Fort Laramie. Caroline stayed up late finishing letters, but Annabelle had been unmoved to do so. Her life in Charleston seemed so long ago, so far removed from her daily reality she doubted her ability to make anyone understand her new life.

As they scrubbed dishes, Annabelle heard a horse's whinnying. Caroline waved to the passing riders, and Annabelle turned in time to see Josey and Lord Byron tip their hats. She quickly returned to her task while Caroline watched them ride away. “Do you think he's handsome?”

“Who?” Annabelle said, not trusting the question.

Caroline giggled. “You know who.” Her hands were busy, but she motioned toward the riders with a nod of her blonde head.

Locking her eyes on the tin plate, Annabelle hoped Caroline couldn't see her face. She scrubbed harder. “I don't know.”

“You've got eyes, don't you?” Caroline giggled again. “I used to not think so. He frightened me.”

Annabelle stopped washing. “What did he do to frighten you?”

“Oh, he didn't do anything. It was just the way he looked. How he never smiled. I told myself he doesn't have a song in his heart, and that frightens me, especially in a man.”

Caroline
would
think of him in terms of a song. Annabelle had never known anyone, especially a woman, who imagined music and could give voice to it like Caroline. “You don't think that now? He wouldn't sing for you last night,” she reminded.

“Seemed to me he was singing for you.”

Annabelle splashed water at her cousin, drawing a girlish shriek.
She's not such a child anymore.
“So you think you misjudged him?”

“He has a song in his heart,” Caroline said. “It's just that it's a sad song.”

Annabelle studied her cousin, wondering at Caroline's meaning. What she saw was just Caroline: bright, pretty and happy, nothing to hide. She would probably start humming a new song any moment. Yet for all her girlish ways, Caroline was starting to see with a woman's eyes. Annabelle wondered if her young cousin didn't see clearer than she.

Finding the riders' camp proved easy. They hadn't expected anyone to come to them. What took so long, once Josey and Lord Byron figured where they were, was riding wide enough of the pickets not to be noticed.

Josey never minded a long ride, especially when he was alone. Riding with Byron wasn't much different. Josey appreciated a man who didn't feel the need to express every thought in his head. He made an exception for the Colonel, who at least usually said something worth hearing. Most men talked just to hear the sound of their voice.

Josey couldn't recall when he realized he disliked most people. He hadn't grown up that way. He had loved his mother and father. He had loved the brother who died of fever when both he and Josey were children. He had friends he loved, though they never expressed it as such. There was a girl he thought he loved before he went to war.

Then things changed.

After watching so many friends die, from sickness or in battle, it was safer not to have friends than mourn new ones. It surprised him just how simple that was. The Colonel called him a misanthrope, a diagnosis Josey didn't dispute. The label was readily reinforced every time someone shot at him. It made rationalizing the killing easy. It was war. It was self-defense. In at least one case, when the men wore the same uniform, the bastards deserved it.

Josey never much questioned the morality of the killing because he never expected to outlive the war. The way he saw things, a number needed to die before both sides lost their taste for it. He didn't know the number. He expected it differed for every war. He never figured the number would prove so high or that he would play such a part in seeing it achieved. Believing himself no different than a bee in a field of wildflowers, Josey stopped questioning his role.

He came to this view because of a book his mother had given him as a boy. He had been stung, and bees frightened him. One day on the porch while his mother snapped beans, a bee floated overhead and Josey swatted at it with such energy and anger she stopped what she was doing.

“Josef, did you know without bees there would be no flowers in the field?”

“No, Mama.”

“Do you like flowers?”

He shrugged. “I don't like bees.”

“I like flowers, Josef. I think the world would be a sorrier place without them.”

“Yes, Mama.” He stopped swatting, but his contrition didn't spare him a sentence of reading the book about insects she gave him. He never forgot the lesson, learned more at his mother's knee than between the bindings of the book: Bees were necessary to make flowers. That's what bees did. Then, when summer ended and the flowers were gone, the bees died.

All things had a season, and Josey's role in the war seemed as simple as that. It was the only way to make sense of everything he had seen. Once he came to view the war in those terms, he stopped mourning what he had become. He was as necessary as the bees. He tended his flowers, resigned to the idea that when his task ended, his end would come, too.