The Way West Part 7

Afterwards, Summers wondered at himself. He sat quiet at the Evanses' board and wondered. Vouching for a preacher! A preacher who thought G.o.d was an old man with whiskers and rode the closest cloud, a thunderbolt in one hand and a sugar-t.i.t in the other.

"No tellin' what people'll do," he said out loud.

Chapter Seven.

DRIVE, plod, push, tug, turn the wheels. Eat dust, d.a.m.n you! Eat mud. Swim in sweat and freeze at night. Work the sun up. Work it down. Keep rolling.

Watch the stock. Fix the wagons. Unload, load, unload. Sleep dead like a brute while the wheels keep turning in your head, and then get up and go. Drive, plod, push, tug. d.a.m.n the dorbugs. d.a.m.n distance. d.a.m.n gullies, streams, trees. Keep going. Three cheers for Oregon.

Fall into bed at night and feel your wife's warmth and know her back is turned. Know it and not care, except deep in you where you keep your hates. Let the knotted muscles melt. Let your mind drift. Let women come into it, like the girl, Mercy McBee. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. All right, so is he. Let sleep flow over you, if you can.

Curtis Mack didn't talk to Amanda, not as man to wife, or encourage her to talk to him. Not these days. Not, he hoped, ever again. They said what had to be said. And sometimes she tried the idle things, weather or mud or dust, and he answered shortly and saw the hurt in her face and was glad of it, and that was all.

It would be all, he told himself as the train rolled on toward the Little Blue and the tension built up in him. He wouldn't bemean himself again. Let her save it, and to h.e.l.l with it! He wouldn't beg as he had begged that night after they had crossed the Kaw.

Spring had been in the air, and a night bird cried outside the tent, and a breeze played along the canvas, and he wanted her, as so many times before.

"No, Curt," she said. "Please!"

"It's been a long time."

She pushed his seeking hand away. "Please."

"Why not?"

"I'm afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Yes."

"Of what?"

"You know."

"You've never been that way yet."

"I could be -and then having no doctor or anything."

"You're just using that as an excuse." She didn't answer.

"You never have really wanted to."

"I know you think that."

"You think it isn't ladylike, I guess. A lady isn't interested."

"Curt!"

"Back home you never wanted to. It's always been a case of rape."

"That isn't true."

"It's close enough." He was silent for a long minute and then, with the urgency mounting in him, he let himself plead. "Please, Amanda. I'm sorry. Now please."

"I can't."

"I've been patient, but I can't go on forever. Please."

"I can't. I'm afraid."

The edge came back into his voice. "You mean not ever, while we're traveling?"

"I don't know."

"My G.o.dl You're going to quit being the half a wife which was the best you ever were. Is that it?"

Her voice was small. "I can't help it, Curt."

"You mean you won't."

She was crying, crying softly, the sobs shaking her. Now, more than ever, he wanted her, wanted the hot, wet cheek against his, and the wounded mouth, and the body yielding and being comforted -except that it wouldn't be.

Another man would have forced her to him. He would have taken her, yes or no. A wife without desire still had a duty. But he wouldn't do it, not Curtis Mack, late of Buffalo, New York, who was built of soft stuff, who had to recognize, beyond his fury, that something stood in her way that he couldn't understand. The recognizing made him madder. Why would G.o.d put beauty in a woman's face and give her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s and fine thighs and then withhold warmth?

"If you had been a real wife," he said, "we'd have stayed in Buffalo."

She didn't try to answer.

"Why do you think I quit business and started west?" She kept silent.

"To quit stewing, that's why. To get things off my mind."

"You exaggerate so."

"That was at the bottom of it."

Her answer was more crying.

"What you want for a husband is a d.a.m.n monk."

She cried out, "Why do you say those things? We love each other. We have so much to live for."

"I'll never ask you again," he said, and hated himself, not for the lie he had spoken but for the weakness in him that made it a lie. He had said the same thing before, and then she had come to him, and he had forgotten resentment and lost his fury and, relaxed in the warm and rumpled bed, had spoken his love for her. He had asked forgiveness and laid the blame on himself for times like tonight's. Soft stuff, Curtis Mack, weak, unstable and -all right- sensual. Was anything wrong with sensuality? What was wrong was her tyranny over him. What was wrong was that he couldn't help himself and was light-spirited or surly, depending on the grant or refusal of so small a favor.

He said, "You drive me to other women."

"I don't mean to, Curt."

"I can't help looking at them and thinking. I'll find another woman, too."

"If that's what you want."

"What do you care? You don't want me."

"If that's what you want."

"Want, h.e.l.l!" He lurched over in bed. "You ought to have married a steer."

Lying there, hearing her soft weeping, feeling with a fierce pleasure the spasms of her body, he told himself he would find another woman. He wanted to be faithful, and she made it impossible, and so he would throw his restraints aside. He would get out of the mold he'd been cast in. People like his parents, lecturing him about sin! People like preachers, like old Brother Weatherby, preaching against evil! People like these emigrants, fixing lashes as punishment for fornication and adultery! All the men l.u.s.tful and all fearful, one of another, wanting to save what they had for themselves but maybe to sneak a little on the side. But suppose a man had nothing, or next to nothing?

He would find himself a woman, he would wrench loose from the morality that had been ground into him. He swore it to himself, resisting, while he swore, the doubt that he could, pus.h.i.+ng aside the forethought of a conscience so guilty it might unman him.

The night bird still called outside, and the breeze still played along the tent. He heard the sneeze of a horse and the distant mooing of a cow. And steady to his ears came the sweep and mutter of the Kaw.

They had crossed the river that day and moved upstream to a piece of open prairie that lay along the bank. He made the scenes pa.s.s in his mind, like a gloss over his fury. They had decided against the ferry because so many of the train were poor, and had had d.i.c.k Summers lead them to a crossing. He saw d.i.c.k Summers now, riding boldly into the river, exploring it for the best pa.s.sage. He saw the wagons rolling into it, the oxen blowing water, and the tight wagons like his own riding easy. Summers and a crew snaked up logs for some of the others, like McBee's, and lashed them to the boxes, making houseboats of a kind. A band of Kaw Indians, curious and intrusive as goats, ran on the bank and splashed in the water, their blankets and feathers and odds and ends of calico s.h.i.+rts showing vivid against the new green of the land. Others paddled back and forth in rough dugouts, ferrying women and children across and the supplies that had been unloaded to lighten the wagons. ' Their pay was tobacco and beads and pieces of old clothing and,it developed later, whatever they could get their hands on and make away with.

Now, as then, Mack let himself look at the women and speculate about them -at Judith Fairman, a pale, tall, pretty girl, long-legged and graceful but a little flat in the bosom; at the little New Englander, Mrs. Patch, who might hide something behind that matter-of-factness; at Mrs. Tadlock, who was quiet and, in a quiet way, comely; at Rebecca Evans, a sociable and good-humored woman with a front like a b.u.t.t of hay; at Mrs. Brewer, who had borne ten children and looked it. He saved the best until last. Then he let Mercy McBee come to his sight. Dark hair and white skin. Young b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Mouth young. Eyes eloquent of something, of sadness like hunger, or hunger like sadness. She wouldn't know about things, but she could be taught.

He couldn't look at Amanda as another man might. He could describe her. He could say she was fair and medium tall, that she had a good form, that her face was oval and her eyes wide apart and more green than brown when you looked close -but he couldn't see her as another man might. Would another man see her differently if he knew she was cold?

Were the others cold? Did the other men have their troubles and go to sleep hungry and sore? Were women like Mrs. Brewer just more obliging or really more ardent? Thou shalt not covet -but he let himself play with the idea of having one of them, of having one who yielded eagerly and tenderly in a secret bed or along a green bank in a screen of willows. Tenderly. That was the word. Maybe what a man wanted, more than anything else, was just tenderness. Amanda couldn't be tender, not outwardly. It wasn't in her. You knew she loved you because of things unsaid, of gestures half completed, of feelings indirectly shown, of favors given with restraint. And, d.a.m.n it, it wasn't enough.

He wrenched the thought of her out of his mind and went back to the river to watch the crossing. The women and wagons and supplies had gone over, and the cattle and loose work stock were footing down the bank, led by d.i.c.k Summers and pushed and kept in line by hors.e.m.e.n white and red. The leaders took to the water and the others followed, and now they were swimming, making a long, eyed line in the sweeping current.

It was an easy crossing. Not an animal lost, or a barrel or a box or a sack, except for small things that the Kaws sneaked away. It was a crossing to make a man jubilant, to make him playful, to make him want his wife.

Mack reared up in bed, pulling the cover from Amanda. "No use to snivel," he said, and got up and pulled on his pants. He couldn't sleep tonight.

He walked around the tents that ringed the corral made by the wagons. He could feel rather than see the horses hobbled or picketed inside the corral. The camp was quiet, except now and then for a mutter, or the hard breath of a man lying on his back, or the sudden, frightened cry of a dreaming child. The fires had died down. Overhead the stars seemed few but big. In their light the wagon tops swam against the dark. A wolf howled somewhere. Or it might have been an Indian. He had heard that Indians imitated wolves sometimes, or wore the hides of elk, while they stole in to make away with stock. He brought his rifle into the crook of his arm.

Someone said, "h.e.l.lo, hoss," and he knew it was Summers. He made him out by the ghost-white of his buckskins and saw he was seated in the clear, where he could watch.

"Don't you ever sleep?"

"Slept enough, farmin', to last me the rest of my life. I reckon."

"I thought farmers were up early and late."

"Nothin' like followin' a mule to rest the mind."

Mack imagined Summers wasn't resting much tonight. While he talked, he still kept listening, still kept looking, as if conversation didn't any more than touch his surface.

"Expecting trouble?" Mack asked.

"Maybe not. Those pore Kaws, though, they get hungry and cold. And stealin's fun to an Injun."

Mack said, "d.a.m.n nuisances," and felt a little surprise when Summers answered, "They got their ways, like we got ours. I reckon we're a heap big nuisance to them."

"I can't see it," Mack answered, though he did. He put an edge in his tone. "They'll have to learn."

He waited, but Summers answered only, "Reckon so."

"I'm going to have a look at the cattle."

The gra.s.s was new and soft underfoot, so that, even in factory shoes, he could walk as quietly as an Indian himself. The cattle would be to the north, away from the river. He took his bearings and confirmed them, idly, by lining up the side of the Dipper with the North Star. After a while he saw movement ahead and called out and walked on up and found the movement to be the boy, Brownie Evans, whom he had hired to help with the cattle.

"All quiet?"

"Critters are kind of scary."

Mack narrowed his eyes and saw the cattle, a darker patch against the dark slope. "Wonder why?"

"Injun smell, I figger."

"Any sign of Indians?"

"Not unless it's them wolves."

"Nearly time for the next watch, isn't it?"

"Be a spell yet."

"Who's out, besides you?"

"Holdridge and McBee and Patch, with the cattle. Summers wanted a strong guard tonight."

"Right."

"Summers says sometimes thievin' Injuns make out to be wolves."

"You'll have to watch out."

"Says he's seen 'em do it, but maybe the Kaws won't. Not much grit in their gizzards."

"You watch, just the same."

"Sure. d.i.c.k says any time you get over the Kaw you better look out. This here's Delaware country."

"Delaware?"

"But it's the p.a.w.nees you have to keep your eyes skinned for."