Chapter Five
A few days later
The road had dried hard after the last rain, rutted deep by long-passed wagon wheels and cut with hoofprints. Clay walked beside the wagon with one hand on the rail, watching Nell pick her way around a washout. The ox followed behind on a length of rope. Its ribs still showed, but not plainly.
Ahead, the trail bent through a stand of pines. Beyond them lay a pale sheet of dust under the afternoon sun.
Tucker sat high on the seat of the Grangers’ wagon, where he had spent most of the past week.
After a long wait, his hearing had finally returned to normal; he had started talking again—talking everyone’s ear off, in fact.
Charlotte had tied his hat under his chin with a strip of blue cloth after he lost the first one in the creek.
He wore it crookedly now, with one ear sticking out under the brim.
Noah Granger drove. His shoulders were bent, but his hands were firm on the reins. Charlotte sat beside him with her sewing basket on her lap. She was patching the knee of Tucker’s trousers, though Tucker had not asked her to.
“You’ll poke yourself,” he told her.
“I have managed to live fifty-two years without your instruction,” Charlotte said.
Tucker leaned closer to inspect her work. “That don’t mean you can’t start listenin’ now.”
Noah made a sound that might have been a cough or a laugh. Charlotte gave Tucker a look over the rim of her spectacles.
Clay smiled despite himself. Tucker caught him looking.
“She put onions in the stew again last night.”
“I did,” Charlotte said.
“He said he liked onions,” Noah told Clay.
“I said I liked them cooked down.”
“They were cooked down.”
Clay put a hand over his heart. “A hard trial.”
“You think everything’s funny,” Tucker said.
“Not everything.”
Tucker considered that. Then he looked toward the trees ahead. “You reckon there’s people over there?”
Clay heard it then. The faint creak of axles. A dog barking once, then again.
“Seems like it,” he said. “You stay in the wagon till we know they’re friendly.”
Tucker’s mouth set. “I know.”
Clay looked up at him. “What did I say?”
The boy scowled at the road. “Stay in the wagon.”
“That’s right.”
They came through the pines and saw the wagons spread across a broad hollow below.
There were more than Clay could count at first. Thirty wagons, perhaps more.
White canvas tops. Brown canvas tops. Wagons loaded with trunks, barrels, chairs tied upside down, iron stoves, and bundles wrapped in oilcloth.
Horses and mules stood hitched in loose lines.
Men were gathered around a cookfire near the middle of the camp.
Clay stopped beside the mare. The Grangers’ wagon rolled up behind his, and Noah pulled the team to a halt.
“Well,” Noah said quietly. “That’s a sight.”
This was like a moving town, perhaps with all the trouble a town could carry.
“Are they from California?” Tucker asked.
“Headed there, likely,” Clay said.
“Maybe they got a cook.”
“I’m not a cook?” Charlotte looked at him. “I’ll remember that.”
“I mean one who cooks pie.”
Noah chuckled and clucked to the horses. “Best go introduce ourselves before somebody decides we’re thieves.”
Clay took the mare’s lead rope and walked down the slope.
A gray-bearded man noticed them first. He stood from beside the fire, his hand settling near the pistol at his belt. Two others rose with him. Clay saw their eyes go to the wagon, then to the ox, then to the rifle lashed under Clay’s seat.
He kept both hands where they could be seen.
“Afternoon,” he called.
The gray-bearded man waited until they were closer. “Afternoon.”
“We’ve come up from the south road,” Clay said. “Name’s Clay McCall. This is Noah and Charlotte Granger. The boy is Tucker. We aren’t looking to cause a fuss. We saw your camp and thought we might travel together awhile, if your people have room.”
The man studied him. He was broad through the chest, perhaps fifty, with a weather-blackened face and a scar down one cheek. “This your family?”
“No, sir.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Natchez.”
The older man’s eyes narrowed a little. “And where are you bound?”
“California.”
“So’s everyone here.”
Clay nodded. “That suits us well.”
One of the men by the fire snorted. Clay did not turn toward him. He knew how young he looked. Nineteen did not make much of an impression among men with wives, children, and wagons full of their lives.
The gray-bearded man looked past Clay to Noah. “You vouch for this young man?”
Noah’s mouth tightened as if he did not care for the question. But he answered plainly.
“He’s a good kid, helped us along. The boy was with him before we met. The ox too.”
“That ox was tied up to die,” Tucker said.
Clay glanced back. Tucker had both hands on the wagon rail.
The gray-bearded man looked at the boy, then at Clay again. “Name’s Harlan Pike. I speak for some of these families. We came out of Missouri six weeks ago.”
“Good to meet you, Mr. Pike.”
Pike rubbed his jaw. “You can camp on the east side tonight. We’ll talk in the morning.”
Clay nodded once. “Fair enough.”
As he turned away, a man near the fire said, “Young fellow’s got himself a fine spread for being alone.”
The speaker was tall and lean, with dark hair combed flat under a sweat-stained hat. He wore a clean vest despite the road dust. His eyes rested on Clay’s wagon, measuring the blankets, the tools, and the sacks of grain.
Clay said, “It’s enough to get by.”
The man smiled without warmth. “That’s all anybody says till they want something.”
Pike gave him a sharp look. “Leave it, Everett.”
Everett lifted both hands. “I’m only makin’ conversation.”
Clay tipped his head and led the mare away.
They made camp where Pike had indicated, just beyond the larger circle of wagons. Clay unharnessed the bay while Noah set blocks beneath one wheel. Tucker jumped down from the Grangers’ wagon, landed wrong in the dust, and tried to hide the limp that followed.
Clay caught him by the back of his shirt before he could go farther.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Show me.”
Tucker tried to pull away. Clay did not let him.
“It’s not broke,” the boy said. “I just landed bad.”
“Sit.”
Tucker sat on the wagon tongue with a great show of suffering. Clay took off the boy’s boot. The ankle was not swollen. He pressed around it carefully.
Tucker flinched at one spot.
“Sprained it a mite,” Clay said. “You’ll keep off it tonight.”
“I can walk.”
“You can. You won’t. Your balance is off; your ears are still troubling you.”
“I was only gonna see the camp.”
“You’ll see it tomorrow.”
Tucker’s eyes went to the children playing near a wagon with red wheels. “They got a dog.”
“You can make its acquaintance when your foot’s better.”
Tucker looked down at the boot in Clay’s hands. “You always tellin’ me what to do.”
Clay set the boot beside him. “That’s because you keep giving me cause.”
The boy’s face changed at that. He pressed his lips together and picked at a splinter in the wood.
Clay crouched in front of him. “You want to last out here, you listen when it matters. That doesn’t make you a baby. It makes you sensible.”
Tucker did not look up. “Jesse teach you that?”
The question had come easy, the way Tucker often asked things. He knew the name. Clay had spoken it once or twice by the fire, when the dark made old memories seem close enough to touch.
“Some of it,” Clay said.
“Was he your brother?”
“Near enough.”
“Would he let you go see the dog?”
Tucker’s face was solemn, but his eyes had a shine in them.
“No,” Clay said. “He’d tell me to rest my ankle.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Charlotte called from the fire. “Tucker, come peel potatoes.”
Tucker brightened. “Can I use the knife?”
“No.”
“I’m nine.”
“And I am still saying no.”
He limped toward her, faster than he ought to have moved. Clay watched until Charlotte caught him by the shoulder and set him down on an upturned crate beside her.
By sundown, smoke from thirty cookfires hung low in the hollow.
The air smelled of bacon grease, coffee, and woodsmoke.
Clay ate potatoes from his tin plate beside Noah, while Tucker sat between Charlotte and a girl of about ten from the next wagon.
The girl had brought over a rag doll with one arm missing.
Tucker was telling her, with great seriousness, how the ox had nearly pulled Clay’s wagon over a bank the day before.
“It did not,” Clay said.
“It near did.”
“It stepped in a hole.”
“That’s what I said.”
The girl looked at Clay with wide eyes. “Did you ever shoot a wolf?”
“No.”
Tucker frowned at him. “You shot at one.”
“I fired in the air, and it ran.”
“Same thing.”
Noah wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Boy’s got a gift for a tale.”
“He learned it from Clay,” Charlotte said.
Clay looked up. “That’s unfair.”
Charlotte’s eyes softened. “Is it?”
Before he could answer, a shadow fell across the fire.
The man called Everett stood there with a tin cup in one hand. Up close, he smelled of tobacco and some sharp cologne that did not belong on the trail.
“Pike says you’re welcome to travel with us,” he said. “Long as you keep pace and pull your share.”
Clay set down his spoon. “I intend to.”
Everett drank from his cup. “You’ll find there’s rules in a company this size. Men decide things together. Can’t have every stray young hand thinking he knows the road.”
Noah moved, slow but clear, beside Clay.
Clay kept his eyes on Everett. “I don’t claim to know it all.”
“Good.” Everett smiled. “Then you’ll learn.”
He walked away toward a wagon set apart from the others. A woman stood outside it, smoking a cigarette in the dusk. Her dark hair was pinned high, though loose strands had fallen around her face. She wore a red ribbon at her throat and looked bored by all of them.
Everett put his hand at the small of her back as he passed. She did not lean toward him. She only watched the smoke rise from her cigarette.
Clay turned back to his supper.
Noah said, “Watch that one.”
“I plan to.”