The Quilt Walk (14 page)

“Does bad luck really come in twos?” I asked Pa as the two of us walked beside the oxen. “That’s what Mrs. Schmidt thinks. Maybe the Indians will get them.”

“I doubt there’s an Indian on the prairie who’d want to get between Mrs. Schmidt and her tongue,” Pa said with a chuckle. Then he said. “Maybe if she complained less, her luck would improve. Luck is what you make it.”

I pondered that as we walked, and decided that Pa might be right. But later I wondered if maybe the wagon train, not the Schmidts, had bad luck.

Mr. Potts had always been careful with his rifle, putting it out of reach of Honor and Bert. As young as they were, the two of them knew they’d be punished if they touched it. Mr. Potts carried the gun carefully, pointing it at the ground, aiming the barrel away when he set it down. He kept it loaded all the time. If a snake or a mad dog was about to strike or if Indians attacked, a rifle wasn’t much good if it wasn’t loaded.

So the accident didn’t make any sense. Mr. Potts might have been spooked by a dog or by the sudden movement of an ox. All we know was something caused the gun to go off. It wasn’t unusual to hear a shot far off, but it was the middle of the day, and we had just stopped for the nooning. The shot had come from the camp. I thought somebody must have aimed at a snake, because after Joey was bitten, everybody was worried about rattlers.

We turned in the direction of the Potts’s wagon but didn’t see anything at first. Then we heard Celia scream and saw her husband fall to the ground. “Help! Jimmy’s been shot!” she called.

Pa rushed to the Potts’s wagon, with Ma and me close behind him. By the time we arrived, others were already there. They had stretched Mr. Potts out on the ground. Ma reached for my arm to stop me, but I brushed past her and stared down at Mr. Potts. His shirt was bloody, and I heard a man say, “Poor fool shot hisself in the belly.”

“Is it bad?” someone asked.

“Gut-shot is as bad as it gets.”

Ma reached for my arm again and tried to pull me away, but Pa stopped her. “Emmy Blue’s old enough to see what a gun can do,” he said.

I wasn’t sure that was true, but I couldn’t keep myself from looking. Ma held me tight as we watched Buttermilk John kneel down and try to stop the bleeding with a wadded up shirt. He shook his head and stood up. “Nothing this child can do. I’m sorry, missus.”

Celia knelt beside her husband. “Jimmy. Oh, please wake up, Jimmy,” she cried.

He moved his hand a little, and she grasped it. Then he turned his head to the side and I could see him take one deep breath. It was his last.

It happened so fast. I was too surprised to cry. One minute Mr. Potts was standing by his wagon, and the next he was gone.

“It’s over,” Ma said, kneeling beside Celia. And then Ma helped her to stand.

“But Jimmy …,” Celia said.

“The men will take care of him. We will plan a service.”

Celia tried to pull away, but Ma held her. “You must tell me Jimmy’s favorite hymns,” she said gently. “And you must paint a marker for him, paint it with your roses on it.”

I was in a daze, but I knew I had to do something. I went to the Potts’s wagon to get the children. Aunt Catherine and I took Ulysses, along with Honor and Bert, to our wagon to play. Pa and Uncle Will and some of the other men went to find shovels to dig a grave. Buttermilk John said we’d stop for the rest of the day, and everyone agreed, even Mr. Bonner.

Late in the afternoon, we laid Mr. Potts to rest. He was put in the grave wrapped just in a quilt, because there was no extra wood to make a coffin. We sang “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” while one man played the pump organ and another a fiddle. Then Uncle Will read from the Bible. Mrs. Bonner gave a prayer. Ma tried to lead Celia away as the men covered up her husband’s body with dirt, but she insisted on staying. When the men were finished, they collected rocks and laid them on top of the grave to keep the wolves from digging it up. Then Celia placed a marker on the grave between two large rocks. She had made the marker from her breadboard and decorated it with roses. Across the top she’d painted, “James Potts, 1837-1864, Beloved Husband and Father. Good-bye, Jimmy. We’ll meet in heaven.”

While I held Ulysses, Celia took the hands of her two other children and stared at the grave, until Ma put an arm around her. Ma told her that Pa would collect her oxen in the morning when he gathered ours. “Emmy Blue will come with you to help with the children. She knows how to drive oxen, too,” Ma said.

Pa did indeed bring in the Potts’s oxen the following morning. He left them with Celia and returned to our campfire for breakfast. Then the two of us went to the Potts’s wagon to make sure everything was in order to move out. I was proud that Ma and Pa thought I could drive the oxen by myself.

When we got there, Paul and Charlie Pitkin, two bachelor brothers who were going to Colorado Territory to farm, were helping Celia and the children into the wagon. The Pitkins were steady men, always willing to do their share of work, Pa said. He’d told me once that the Pitkins weren’t a lot of fun, but you’d sure want them with you in time of trouble.

“Your girl’s a mite young to be in charge of the oxen,” Charlie Pitkin told Pa. “Being as there’s two of us, we thought we could help Mrs. Potts drive her team.”

His brother nodded. “Least we can do to help a neighbor.”

I looked up at Celia, who was sitting on the wagon seat, holding Ulysses. She sat very still, as if she were a jumping jack that had been broken and couldn’t fling its arms and legs around anymore. “I’ll come tend Ulysses later,” I told her.

She barely moved her lips to say, “Thank you.”

Ma looked surprised when Pa and I returned. “Emmy Blue isn’t driving the oxen?” she asked.

“The Pitkin boys,” Pa told her.

Ma nodded. “They are good men.”

Chapter Sixteen

INDIANS!

I
missed Joey. I had plenty to do, tending Celia’s three children when she needed me. I helped Ma even more with the cooking and laundry, because the journey had sapped her strength. She rode in the wagon much of the time now.

The other children in the train were either younger or older than I was, so there was nobody for me to play with. There was Waxy to keep me company, but she had to stay in the wagon, because the hot sun would melt her, and after Joey, she wasn’t as much of a companion as she had been before I met him. There was Barebones, of course, but except for him, I was by myself much of the time. I wandered out onto the plains, but it wasn’t any fun lying on the ground with just my dog and finding images in the clouds. I couldn’t point them out to
him
. And gathering buffalo chips had become just one more chore. Even Barebones let me down after a while. He liked to go with Pa when Pa hunted antelope. So I didn’t always have him with me when I explored the prairie.

I still looked for rocks and feathers, dried leaves and snake skins, but there was nobody to share my treasures with. Sometimes I’d just find a place to sit down and think about Joey, about the trip west, and whether we, too, ought to have gone back home.

I didn’t want to, of course. I decided Ma didn’t either. She said she was beginning to like the prairie, even though it was nearing summertime now, and getting very hot. We had come a long way, and soon we’d see the tips of mountains. Every day I searched the horizon, but I hadn’t spotted them yet. We’d crossed the Mississippi and the Missouri. We’d seen Indians and death. My friend had turned back, but I’d found a new one in Barebones. I’d grown up, too. Ma said that I’d been a little girl when we left Quincy but had become almost a young woman over the last months.

“Our girl is growing up. I’m proud of her,” Pa said, then laughed. “I sure hope that after all this work we went to raise her, she doesn’t get snatched up by an Indian.”

I’d worried about Indians ever since Pa announced we were going west. The first thing Abigail had said after I told her we were moving to Golden was, “Be careful you don’t get shot dead with an arrow.”

We’d seen Indians in St. Joe, of course, but they were beggars, and not like the Indians who came near our camp on the prairie. We could always spot them riding far off or sitting on their ponies, watching the wagons pass. A few times they came closer, and wandered into our camp. Buttermilk John said they wouldn’t hurt us. If they were warriors, he told us, they wouldn’t have brought their wives and children with them. But he did say they might rob us. “Ye’d be wise to keep a sharp watch. But it wouldn’t hurt to share your food with them,” he told us.

One night an Indian family came to our campfire. The father pointed to his mouth and said, “Beeskit, ko-fee.” Ma, who had just taken a pan of biscuits out of the skillet, held it out to him. The Indian man ate them all, making Ma frown.

The man pointed to his mouth and said, “More, more.” Ma set the rest of the biscuits on the plate, but this time, she set the plate in front of the woman and children. “They can eat their fill before I give another bite to that greedy man,” Ma said. I hoped the Indian man didn’t understand English.

After the family had eaten, the woman took a pair of beaded moccasins from her dress pocket and held them out for Ma to see. Then the woman pointed to me.

“She wants to trade,” Buttermilk John explained. He took the moccasins and studied them. “Fine work, this.”

“Emmy Blue could use moccasins. I don’t like her stepping barefoot on rocks and thorns,” Ma said. “What does she want for them?”

“I reckon a handful or two of flour.”

“That’s little enough,” Ma said.

The woman held out a buckskin sack, and Ma filled it. Then as the woman touched her children to move them along, Ma said, “Wait.” She went to the wagon and came back with a large scrap of the bright red fabric that Aunt Catherine had bought for her in St. Joseph. Putting one hand over her heart, she gestured to the Indian woman with the material. “For you.”

The woman stared at Ma but didn’t speak or even smile. She took the fabric, rubbing it between her fingers, then showed it to her children as she said something in her native language. The little girl touched the cloth, and then smiled at me.

“She likes it. That was nice, Ma.” I said.

“I can’t imagine there’s a woman, white or red, who can resist pinching a bit of yard goods between her fingers,” Ma said.

I went to sleep that night and dreamed about living on the plains like the family that came to our campfire, galloping on my own horse across the prairie.

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The heat often made me tired, and when we’d pass shady areas, I would sometimes stop to rest with my quilt squares. I still didn’t care much for quilting, but I liked it better now that I had the hang of it, and especially now that the squares were almost done. It surprised me how much I could sew just walking along. It would be nice if Waxy had a coverlet, I decided the next morning, since Honor Potts had borrowed the one Abigail had given me for her rag doll and I hadn’t wanted to ask for it back.

Thinking about my Log Cabin quilt, I removed a square from my pocket, my last one. I had walked out in front of the wagons, so I had time to sit and work on the quilt square before the train passed by. Pa had warned me not to lose sight of the wagons, but ours was a long train and slow, so I had plenty of time. There was a ravine lined with rocks, and after checking for rattlesnakes, I sat down on one of the rocks in the sun and set the pieces next to me. There were four left to attach to that square, and I spread them out in order before I began stitching. If I hurried, I figured, I could get all four of them attached before the train moved beyond me.

The sun was hot, and my fingers perspired, making the needle damp. It squeaked as I pushed it through the fabric. I finished the first strip, then the second. As I worked on the third, the wagon train finished passing me. Finally, I started on the fourth strip, pinning it to the square and taking tiny, neat stitches, the way Ma had taught me. At last, I was finished! All I had left to do was sew the squares together. Now I was truly happy I’d made the quilt.

I folded the square and placed it in my pocket, thinking I ought to find our wagon. But I decided to sit a bit longer. It was so hot. I tried fanning myself with my hand, but that didn’t help, so I leaned back against the rocks and turned my head to the side, out of the sun, to rest for just a moment. Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

I didn’t know how long I slept. When I awoke, the trail was dusty in both directions, and I tried to remember which way the wagons had been headed. I thought I heard chains clanking in the distance, but I wasn’t sure. I knew we followed the sun, but the sky had clouded over while I slept. A coyote ran past in the sagebrush. I’d heard coyotes howling at night and had seen them slinking along behind the wagons, their yellow teeth like saw blades.

I started in the direction of the noise. Pa wouldn’t like it that I’d dawdled. I couldn’t have been asleep that long, maybe only a few minutes, I thought. But as fast as I ran, I couldn’t seem to see where the wagons were. I stopped and listened, but I didn’t hear anything now. What if I were going in the wrong direction? That worry gave me an idea, and I crouched down to see if I could make out animal prints. That would tell me the direction the wagon train had taken, I decided. But the wind had come up, and I couldn’t make out the prints. I wandered off the trail a little, hoping to spot boot prints in the sand.