Crossing Purgatory (4 page)

Thompson walked into the clearing, and to avoid concern, made himself seen to three men coming in from the animals. He raised a hand in greeting, although he did not stop to engage them. Instead, he retreated to the tree line, cleared a small patch of ground and built a fire. In his tin cup he cooked cornmeal mush. Just before sunset a man approached from the smaller gathering of wagons. He threw a long shadow as he walked across the grass. Thompson judged the man almost as tall as himself and heavier through the chest and shoulders. He wore buckskin pants, a dark shirt, black boots, and a hat with a large, flat brim. Thompson set his cup on the ground beside the fire and stood to meet him.

“Good evening,” said the man, “name's Upperdine. Captain John Upperdine.”

“Thompson Grey.”

“Might I ask your intentions, stopping here?” Captain Upperdine said.

“Well, my immediate intentions are to finish my supper. I haven't much thought beyond that.”

Upperdine smiled and removed his hat and scratched his head.

“I pilot a group of settlers. It is my job to think beyond your supper.” Upperdine's tone conveyed neither anger nor threat, but he clearly expected a reply and he waited, hat in hand.

“I appreciate your responsibility,” Thompson complied. “I am simply a traveler on the road.”

“You are heading into the territory?”

“I am.”

“Afoot?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“To farm?”

“Yes.” Thompson said, without thinking. His answer startled him, caused a physical reaction, a cocking of the head, as if listening for a sound in the distance, unsure of what he had heard, and he amended his response.

“What I meant was that perhaps I will farm. I have not considered it fully.”

“To trade, maybe?” Upperdine pressed.

“I have no wish to trade.”

“Well,” Upperdine said, “it's none of my concern.” He pulled on his hat, adjusted the brim. “It's just that land is about all there is in the western territories. Cheap. Some of it passable fertile. If it's not land you're seeking, nor trade, I fear you are dead ripe for disappointment.”

Thompson had no answer. He looked off across the meadow toward the smaller cluster of wagons. The fires began to glow in the twilight.

“I'll not interrupt your supper any longer.” Upperdine started off and then turned. “Some advice?”

“Any advice is welcome.”

“I've crossed these grasslands more than once. This time of year, daytime heat builds up, sweat like you was breaking a fever. Nights, the chill seeps in right to the bones because your clothes ain't dried out yet. I'd invest in a good wool shirt. Something that wicks. And maybe buckskin trousers.”

“Appreciate your insight. Thank you.”

Thompson ate his mush without tasting, added wood to the fire, watched the flames lick into the deepening night. He'd answered, yes. Yes, he'd farm. The realization stunned him. He had no heart for it, had no conscious intention of ever again putting plow to soil; but at the instant of his spontaneous response to Upperdine he'd voiced his destiny. He worked the land. That is what he was made for. He'd till and sow, reap and store, filling time between the present and that predestined moment in the future he would arrive at the gates of Hell. He'd farm, but not back East. He'd defiled that land and would not return.

Next morning, Thompson walked into town and spent a good portion of one double eagle on clothing and what food he could carry, splurging on a small bag of coffee. He would be pleased to be rid of the clothes on his back. He'd picked up fleas or lice or both from the roadhouse mattress, and the itching had grown progressively more irksome.

Returning to the woods, he bathed at the stream before it ran into the pasture. He stripped off his clothes and scrubbed his head and body with a scrap of lye soap he'd purchased in town. He inspected his arm wounds. His needlework had closed the gashes and allowed healing to begin, but was no work of art. The scars welted up, jagged and red. He discarded his old clothes after tearing a few rags from his shirt, left them in a heap beside the trail. He stepped into woolen underclothes and the buckskin trousers and began to pull on his new shirt, then stopped and hung it on a limb and returned to the stream. He wetted one of the rags and brought it to his face and soaked his whiskers. He used his skinning knife first to trim the beard close and then, after another soaking, to shave. Thick stubble remained and he made note to purchase a straight razor. But for the first time since Deep Woods, Indiana, since leaving his family, he exposed his face to the world, nicked and raw, for judgment.

He arrived back at the meadow rendezvous midafternoon just as a thundershower blew in from the northwest. He ducked back into the woods and sat under the overhang of an oak tree watching the rain slant in. Not heavy but windblown. It appeared that during the day a few additional wagons had arrived. After the quick shower, a golden light washed the meadow. The grass bejeweled. The oxen steaming.

Moving toward his camp, Thompson noticed a man working at one of the wagons. He had the back wheel off and was attempting to remount it on the axle. The man rolled the wheel into position while a boy and a Negro were struggling to raise the back end of the wagon using a large tree limb as a lever. The boy's feet were off the ground, hanging from the end of the limb, but the axle was not plumb to the hub. Thompson went to the boy and lent his weight to the lever and after some maneuvering, the back end rose sufficiently for the wheel to slide back over the hub.

“Obliged,” from the man guiding the wheel. He appeared several years older than Thompson and slight, thin as a whip. A close-trimmed beard. Denim trousers that bunched at his waist, held up with suspenders. He wiped his hand on his blue work shirt and offered it to Thompson. “Obadiah Light. Sorry to inconvenience you.”

“Thompson Grey. No trouble at all.”

The Negro carried the limb off to the side and they all watched him as he began to chop it into firewood.

“Iron rim and brake lever wanted some work,” Obadiah said. “Wagon's only as good as its wheels.”

“That is so,” Thompson said.

“I aimed to avoid having to unload the wagon. Left the back end overly heavy. Slothful, I suppose.”

Thompson noticed the covered box of the wagon full of household goods: a spinning wheel, chests, two chairs, one inverted on the other, coiled rope, harness gear, sacks of grain, tools, a steel-tipped plow, grinding stone, and, near the back, a small parlor organ.

“I would not envy you that task,” Thompson said.

“I'd be pleased to have you sup with us,” Obadiah said.

Behind the wagon, a woman stood beside an iron pot suspended on a tripod over the low fire. A young girl, a toddler in blond curls, played in the grass with a cornhusk doll while the boy, the one who had been on the lever with Thompson, busied himself repacking tools in the box mounted above the front wheel. Thompson saw that the boy was older than he'd first judged, maybe just coming into shaving age, a faint presence above the lip. Slight of frame like his father, but undaunted, it seemed, about jumping to a man's work. The woman came over to the wagon, smiled at Obadiah, and folded down the rear gate into a table. She showed. How far along, Thompson wondered.

“My wife, Hanna. The boy, Joseph, and my girl, Martha.”

Thompson nodded to the woman and the boy, and smiled at the little girl. Hanna set the kettle on the gate and retrieved a ladle and some tin bowls from a box on the far side of the wagon.

“Simple fare,” she said, “some bread.” She served a soup of desiccated vegetables flavored with field greens and a few wild onions.

“I've not had bread in a while,” Thompson said. “Thank you.” Bread from wheat, not corn.

“I can trouble to knead it proper when we're laying over. No time on the trail.”

Obadiah pulled at the waist of his dungarees. “These were filled out when we left home. Had a little sickness. Some difficult times. But we're on our last leg now,” he explained. “Barely two hundred mile to go.” The Lights were from eastern Ohio, he said, on the road since early spring, bound for central Kansas Territory, near Great Bend, beyond the far reaches of settlement. Hanna learned she was pregnant two months prior to their departure but kept the news from him. She knew his heart was set on homesteading and she did not wish to cause him to reconsider.

Listening to their story, Thompson sensed himself slipping back, and he fought to remain in the present. Still, images, like lightning strikes, flashed behind his eyes.

R
ACHEL HAD OBJECTED TO HIS
being gone. “The fields need tending,”

“I'll be a few days only. I need to secure funds.”

“We have more acreage now than we can put into crops.”

“We'll grow into it. The boys.”

“Coveting is a sin, the Bible says.”

“Don't quote me the Book,” Thompson said, angry.

T
HOMPSON SHOOK THE PAST FROM
his mind and refocused on the Lights' company, Martha playing with her doll, feeding it scraps of bread.

They stood around the table, evening coming on, eating, talking idly of inconsequential matters. Weather, mileage, the soil. Presently the Negro came over from his work and Mrs. Light served him supper and he stood with them eating. The idea of sharing a meal with a Negro would never have registered with Thompson before, but he found himself curious rather than put off.

“This here's Ned, Mr. Thompson,” Obadiah said. “Ned Frederick, named after the county in Virginia where he was set free.” Ned inclined his head and said “How do?” and Thompson nodded back. Ned was a stocky man, ebony-skinned, with eyes that looked as though he'd had sorrow. As he ate, Thompson noticed that he was missing two fingertips of his left hand.

“Ned is a wonder with a saw and adze, a carpenter without peer in my book,” Light went on. “He's traveling with us. I'm holding his papers for him until we reach territory where he can set hisself up without looking over his shoulder every waking minute.”

“Is there such a place?” Thompson asked.

“We fixed on th' hope,” Ned answered.

Obadiah set his tin on the wagon gate and stretched. “And you, Mr. Grey. Family?”

“No. I am alone.” And, after a silence, “I best see to my fire before dark. I thank you for your hospitality.” Thompson shook Obadiah's hand and nodded to Hanna and to the boy. And, as an afterthought, to Ned. He knelt in the grass and patted Martha on the head and then stood and returned to his camp. He folded some of the coffee beans in a flap of buckskin and pounded it with a flat stone. He shook out the grounds in his cup and boiled some coffee over the fire. A movement in the grass, a sound, and from the shadowy light Upperdine emerged.

“Mr. Thompson.”

“Captain Upperdine, good evening.” Thompson pointed to his coffee. “Have you a cup? I'd be pleased to offer coffee.”

Upperdine untied the tin cup at his belt and held it out and Thompson poured half of his coffee into the cup. Upperdine raised the cup to his nose and inhaled the steam coming off the liquid.

“Simon Pure, the real thing. We normally get by on some godawful adulteration, a few grounds mixed with dried peas, toasted grain, what have you.”

Both men squatted on their boot heels close to the fire and drank the coffee without conversation. The rain had brought alive the mosquitoes, and the smoke from the cook fire helped knock them back. Crickets sounded in the tall grass. Upperdine broke the silence between them.

“I ride out tomorrow to see that the streams are not overly swollen by the rains. The following day we break camp.”

“Will all the wagons form up?”

“It was decided yesterday evening that the two bands will remain separate.”

“A disagreement?” Thompson asked.

“Most folks just want to be left alone to follow their plans. Buy land cheap. Put in a crop. Better their lot. But sometimes voices get raised and bad blood results.”

“What company do you pilot?” Thompson asked.

“The smaller of the two.”

Thompson had boiled more coffee, and he divided it between them. It was full dark and campfires dotted the field. Sparks flew up when one, then another was stirred up.

“Basically, Mr. Thompson, I am a freighter,” Captain Upperdine said. “My commission is to deliver goods. Pelts and hides from west to east, housewares and equipment from east to west. Sometimes, emigrants to the opened territory. Makes little difference to me, except that truck is a sight less bothersome to handle than human freight.”

“Less argument from a bolt of cloth,” Thompson said, shaking the dregs of the coffee into the fire.

“Exactly.” Upperdine stood and stretched. “I'd like you to consider joining our party when we depart.”

Thompson thought to answer no, but instead asked, “Why me?”

“You said you were aiming west. My party is small. I could use another strong back. Another rifle, if need arises.”

“I travel best alone,” said Thompson.

“I understand. But this is perilous country you are about to enter. Men destitute of character roam this trail. Better traveled in company.”

“I lack funds to pay my share.”

“I've already settled with the company. I need hands. Mr. Light recommended you. A good neighbor, he vouched.” Upperdine waited. Thompson thought about his offer, and his pause seemed to give Upperdine momentum to continue.

“I come out here a pup, signed up with Mr. Bent in the late '30s to teamster. Marched with General Kearny's Army of the West to Santa Fe in forty-six. Put down roots on the Purgatoire River in the western territory. Been up and down the Santa Fe trail more times than I can count. This is a harsh country. A challenge for a man alone. I don't know what you want from this land, but whatever your ambitions, I can provide alliance.”