Trail Angel (12 page)

“I might be able to get you spare parts. A few hours ago we passed the ruins of a wagon. I might be able to get something there.”

“I don't remember seeing a broken-down wagon,” Caleb said.

“It was on the other side of the river.” Josey Angel addressed the others. “Some train must have had to make a river crossing. I suppose a wagon overturned or broke down and washed up on the bank. I'll ride back and look for a wheel.”

The others welcomed the suggestion, Rutledge in particular.

“Are you sure the wheels aren't busted, too?” Caleb asked.

“Won't know until I get there. Even if they are, we might salvage enough parts to fix this one.”

“You could do that, couldn't you, Caleb?” Rutledge asked.

Caleb sensed he was in for a long night, and he doubted there would be any extra money in it for the work he did. But the job had never been about the money to Caleb. He was in as big a hurry as anyone to get to Montana.

Smith offered to ride with Josey. Caleb held back a chortle on hearing Rutledge suggest it would be a good idea to have as many spare parts as they found.
Wish I had thought of that.

“Check the wheels before you come back,” Caleb told them. The rear wheels were about six inches bigger in diameter than the front wheels, which helped the wagons take sharper turns. He wouldn't expect the scout to think of something like that. “Make sure you get another rear wheel.”

It felt good to be the one giving orders for once.

Josey Angel would be gone for hours looking for a wheel, and Caleb enjoyed the attention that came with being the man of the moment. Walking among the wagons, he offered the other drivers his wisdom on the upkeep of their equipment, whether or not they seemed to welcome it.

Still feeling full of himself, he saw Annabelle walking toward the wagons with her pretty cousin. The younger girl was turning into quite a cherry with her long, blonde hair and pert face. To look at her from the neck down though, she still had the figure of a twelve-year-old boy.

Caleb's eyes rolled past her to Annabelle. She was changing, too. The time outdoors had ruddied her complexion. Gone was the Charleston society lady with porcelain skin. Instead of tying back her hair and covering it with a bonnet, Annabelle had taken to letting her long, dark curls fall loose, the way a girl might. All that walking had changed her body, too, made her leaner, stronger. It wasn't the look a gentleman might fancy, but it suited Caleb fine. He admired the way her long strides pulled the dark dress tight against her thighs. She looked less like a doll to be put upon a shelf than a woman who appreciated the value of a day's work in a man—and might know just how to reward him for it.

The girls were talking happily and didn't notice Caleb's approach until he called out a greeting. Caroline showed him a handful of yellow flowers they'd gathered.

“They grow on the prickly pear,” she said. “Such a pretty flower for such a nasty plant.”

Caleb admired them. “I would be happy to help you find more.”

“I think we've got all we need,” Annabelle said. “We're going to press them into a book Caroline's been keeping.”

“That sounds nice,” Caleb said, afraid he sounded like a fool.
What did gentlemen talk about with ladies?
Nothing sounded right. So he explained how he was waiting for Josey Angel—saying the name as if identifying a truant schoolboy. He sensed from their reaction they failed to grasp his importance to the company. As they made their farewells, he hastened after them. “You should ask me to go with you the next time you go hunting wildflowers.”

“Oh,” Annabelle responded, “we couldn't trouble someone like you with such a little thing.”

Caleb wasn't sure he liked her tone. “It's dangerous for two such pretty girls to go off from the camp.” Caroline blushed a little but Annabelle gave no sign of acknowledging the compliment. “You might come across Indians or bears.”

“I wish we would see an Indian,” Caroline said. The only Indians they'd seen had been in towns or near settlements, dressed almost like white men in store-bought shirts and pants without a stripe of war paint. “I'm beginning to think there aren't any left.”

“You wouldn't wish that if you were alone, with no man to protect you.” Caleb smiled at Annabelle, but she didn't return the good humor. Her face had darkened.

She looked like she might say something when a child's shrieks jolted them. A woman's anguished cries joined the screams from the direction of the wagons. The girls moved that way, but Caleb outpaced them. The sounds came from a wagon near the back of the line. Caleb recognized it as belonging to the Brewsters, one of the Yankee families. The sound seemed to come from inside the wagon.

Or under it.

Caleb stopped short of Brewster's wagon. A tow-headed child, barely more than a toddler, sat in the dirt beneath it. Curled before him was the biggest rattlesnake Caleb had ever seen. Coiled to strike, it looked to be taking the bawling child's measure. The boy's mother stood frozen beside the wagon, compensating for her inaction with screams for somebody, anybody, to do something.

I should do something.
Caleb had been the first man to arrive. Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Chestnut held back the mother. “Stay back,” he said, in case they needed to hear it from a man.

Annabelle came to his side. “Where's your gun?”

His gun.
Good idea.
The sight of the snake transfixed him.
Sweet Jesus, it's big.
Coiled like that, Caleb couldn't tell how long it was. Green and gray with brown blotches across its back, the monster looked engorged. It would have taken both of Caleb's hands to encircle it, not that he intended to try. Neither snake nor boy moved, a noisy standoff, the faint whirring of the coiled snake's rattle nearly drowned out by the purple-faced boy's howls.

Brewster, the boy's father, came with a pickaxe, but he hesitated on seeing the snake.
Brother, you're going to need a bigger pick.
Brewster looked to be judging how best to strike, but the snake's position under the wagon presented no clear trajectory, even if he were confident of his aim.

“Your gun. Go get your gun,” Annabelle urged, her hand pulling on Caleb's arm.

Yes. That's right.
Caleb stepped back toward his wagon, his eyes still fixed on the snake.
I'll be a hero if I kill that monster.
Annabelle would like that. He had killed a snake not long ago.
What if I miss?
It wasn't such an easy thing to hit a snake with a bullet, especially with so many people around and a child so near and screaming like a banshee.
Better get the rifle.

“Go on,” Annabelle said, both hands on his arm, tugging him away from the wagon. Others arrived, crowding the area between the boy and the other wagons.

“Let me through,” Caleb announced, “I'm going to get my gun.”

“I've got a gun,” one of the other men said.

I want mine.
The idea of missing the shot was still in his head. Better he take the shot with a gun he knew. More people ran up, shouting questions and conflicting commands over the boy's shrieks and the mother's screams.

The sound of pounding hoof falls added to the cacophony. Caleb turned in time to see the snake fly up as if launched by springs. In the same moment, every emigrant flinched at the sound of thunder, and the heavy-bodied snake fell to the ground, limp as rope.

Caleb looked up to see Josey Angel, still on horseback, his revolver already holstered. With a light-footed leap, he was off the horse and had scooped the boy in his arms even before the sound of the shot stopped reverberating in Caleb's head. Annabelle and the boy's mother rushed forward. Caleb followed, still a little stunned. Taking the boy from Josey Angel, Mrs. Brewster looked to be washing him in her tears, holding him so tight no one could see the boy's wounds. Josey Angel gently pried the boy loose as Annabelle wrapped her slender arms around the mother.

“It's his hand,” Josey Angel said.

There was already reddening and swelling around the puncture wound. Josey Angel tugged the kerchief off his neck and wound it over the boy's hand above the wound. “His heart's racing. Keep him calm, if you can,” he said to the mother. “We should wash this.”

“Shouldn't you suck out the poison or cut it or something?” Caleb had heard that once.

“That won't help,” Josey Angel said, never taking his eyes off the boy.

“We have some hartshorn,” Annabelle said.

“Go get it.” To the mother Josey Angel said, “We'll have him drink a little.”

Before Annabelle rose, Mrs. Fletcher called out, “We have hartshorn. Our wagon's right here.” She ran off.

The entire wagon train had turned out. Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Chestnut guided Mrs. Brewster, still clutching the boy, while the men ran off to get fresh water. The Chestnut boy and Annabelle's cousins, Mark and Jimmy, gathered around the snake.

“Stay back,” Josey Angel commanded, in a voice that brooked no disobedience. “Even a dead snake might bite.”

The children backed away, creating a circle around the snake.
I should cut off its head.
But the image of a dead snake reflexively biting him rooted Caleb to the spot. Annabelle sat beside Josey Angel. “Is he going to live?”

“I don't know.” Josey Angel pulled a large Bowie knife from his belt and with an arc of his arm quick as a finger snap he cut clean the snake's head. He pointed to the engorged body with the knife. “Looks like it just ate. Maybe the boy didn't get a full dose.”

“He must have come across it while playing,” Annabelle said. Caleb saw tears in her eyes.

“It might have been sharing a prairie dog burrow there under the wagon,” Josey Angel said. “Just bad luck.”

“Bad luck,” Annabelle repeated. Her body shook slightly with the tears she had been fighting back.

I should go to her. Comfort her.
Caleb stepped toward Annabelle just as Josey Angel stood and extended his hand. She took it and rose beside him, nearly as tall as he. “Thank you,” she said to Josey Angel. Seeing Caleb as he turned, Josey Angel kicked the snake's body a safe distance from its severed head. “You can feed that to the pigs.”

The Brewsters' boy was recovering the next day when Annabelle went to call on the family. She and her mother had brought food the night before, knowing Julia Brewster would be in no condition to cook. It seemed every family in the wagon train had the same idea. Sara Fletcher had even baked a pie using jarred peaches. The bachelor miners saw to unhitching the family's team of oxen so Alexander Brewster could pray over his son while some of the other men tended to his wagon.

The boy, David, lay wrapped in blankets in a bed in the family's wagon. His mother, Julia, sat beside him, looking drawn and hollow-eyed after a long night. “He's finally resting,” she said, describing a night of pain and nausea. “We struggled to keep him calm. His sleep is the greatest blessing we could have.”

Even in their anxiety, the Brewsters had been so grateful for the kindness of the other emigrants, so welcoming to their visitors that Annabelle regretted not calling on them sooner. The Brewsters were from a small town in New York, and they tended to sup with the other Yankee families, just as Annabelle and her family socialized more often with their fellow southerners. An uneasiness lingered after the war, like a wound sore to the touch. Now Annabelle realized she hardly knew these people. Little David looked no different than children she had known in Charleston. His parents spoke the same language as she, even if their pronunciation sounded somewhat different. Annabelle noted that Josey's kerchief was still tied around the boy's swollen hand.

“It was worse last night,” Julia said, smoothing out the blankets beneath her boy's hand. “Alex said it looked like a cooked sausage about to burst.”

After the Colonel's illness and losing a day of travel because of the broken wheel, the travelers gathered around their campfires the previous night welcomed the news of David's recovery. As they prepared meals to share with the Brewsters, Mr. Smith made the rounds of the camps, eager to tell the tale of his afternoon with Josey. The burly farmer sounded proud as kin as he described how Josey swam his horse across the river and retrieved two wheels and parts from two others, using a rope to float them across when he swam back. With parts from the wagon, they fashioned a travois to drag the equipment and were nearly back to the camp when they heard David's cries. Josey cut loose the travois and galloped the rest of the way.

Recalling his gentleness with David, Annabelle might have thought it was a different man in Josey's clothes who tended the boy. He'd never given an indication he cared a whit for any of them—until it had been necessary.

Was Mother right about him?
No one she knew had come back from the war the same. The ones who'd seen the most fighting had been blanketed by sorrow and suffering for so long that all joy and lightness seemed smothered from them. Annabelle wondered if the war killed the capacity for joy in them—or merely covered it beneath heavy folds of mourning. Annabelle knew about mourning, but hers had been focused outward, toward those she had lost.
What might it be like to mourn what you had done as well as what you had lost?
There might be sadness in that at least as great as her own.

Taking David's good hand, Annabelle stroked the boy's delicate skin, noticing how impossibly small his fingers seemed. It amazed her that such tiny, perfect beings grew into adults. Julia watched her with a look of contentment, like someone nestled before a fire after venturing into a bitter cold. “You were widowed before you had children?”