and examined each side of it. “Somebody from the old mission days, husband?”
He pulled one strand of silver-and-chestnut mustache. “It’s a common Spanish word, but it makes no sense, and I don’t know anybody by that name. And why should a local send us a telegram? About to give us a heart attack, by God.”
“Oh! The historical society!” she yelped.
“I thought you were the historical society.” His wry tone made five-year-old Jacob laugh.
“Mama, I thought you were the hysterical society,” he said. His mispronunciation made the parents laugh as well.
“No, the main charter. The Pioneer Society of California headquarters is quite set on the mission. You know, their office is in San Francisco, and they send an occasional wire to the railroad, I suppose, but...” She touched Jeremiah’s hand. To Jacob she said, “And I don’t think I’m the hysterical society all by myself when your father is twice the worrywart that I am.”
“A-S-I,” he said each letter separately. “Abner Stiles... the First?”
“By telegram? From Santa Rosa?”
“Something to do with the senator, or Fremont. Maybe I’m expected to do something by Abner. By God, what a day,” Jeremiah muttered. “That boy. What do you suppose about him, Lucy?”
“When do we see the fireworks?” Jacob asked.
“First that boy,” Lucinda said, “and then this telegram! What’s next?”
“Are the fireworks at sunup?”
“Jake, the fireworks begin soon as it gets nice and dark.” He set the boy on his lap. “This is a big day, as you know.” He brushed the boy’s hair from his forehead and thought of his first son, Miguel, and sighed. “Your pap has to give a little speech to introduce some dignitaries, and your ma has the local history exposition. Old friends and bigwigs will come by train and speak as well.”
“Can I watch the train come in with you?”
“I reckon you can. As if the valley didn’t have enough steam spewing up from the geysers and the new locomotive station, a bunch of us will create a cloud of hot air in Santa Rosa to rival that in Washington, D.C.”
The boy scrunched his features thoughtfully. “Why you want to do that for, Pap?”
Lucinda laughed and, with the babe balanced on a hip, stacked the dirty dishes in the washbasin. “We’re all doing this to celebrate a very special birthday,” she said.
“Somebody’s got a birthday party today, too? On the Fourth?” he asked his father. “Who is it? A famous fellow comin’ by the train?”
“Very famous,” Jeremiah said.
“The United States of America,” Lucinda said. “Husband, will you milk that cow before you get the team ready?”
“Yes, but mightn’t I ride to the office for this urgent matter from Abner first?”
“And leave our poor cow high and dry?”
“Is it a old fellow or a kid?” the boy asked, and the parents exchanged a look and laughed, and Jeremiah was struck by the radiance of his wife’s smile.
“Officially he’s a centenarian, one hundred years of age, but I’d say he’s still a child in many ways,” he replied. “Wouldn’t you, wife?”
“An infant.” She held their daughter and the pail of dishes and smiled as man and son walked out toward the bellowing cow, and Jeremiah thought, as he often had, of the nation as a babe, a noisy, squalling infant filled with every human defect and blessing, a greedy, hungry child grasping and demanding succor, blindly clawing and drinking of the treasure of the wide earth’s breast. He thought of how oft he’d loved and scolded this bawling infant nation, this child of the mothering wide and sinuous rivers and the rigid fathering steeples of church and courthouse, of how precious were the scales in the hands of Sister Justice as we tried to live as men of law and principle in a wilderness of emotion and superstition. He helped his son draw the milk from the rotund udder in the rich smell of manure and straw and thought of the professor’s many pronouncements about America and California, this Eden stolen from Mexicans and Indians, this experiment in the creation of a new world. And as the boy and he lugged the milk pail he saw Lucinda set the babe in the grass a moment among dandelion fluff and commence pumping water. She bent over the long handle from the spring pipe and, as if aware of his glance upon her, turned and smiled, and he smiled back and remembered their first encounter, in the wilderness of Kansas. Three days after the Missouri jump, across Walkarusa Creek and the Kansas River by Papin’s Ferry, the spring rain abated, and a shaft of
sunlight touched the wet buds of the willows and golden
• FOUR •
April 1845
pigtails suddenly appeared among the branches,
and a girl in a gingham dress hanging wash turned to see their wagon and smiled as they passed. They were a bedraggled lot, as Father had tried to get by without the outfitting of the average emigrant, scrimping and making do at every turn, and Jeremiah had been choking and wheezing for air in the cramped wagon beside his sister Ruth. From the opening in the Osnaburg covers coated with stinking gutta-percha against the rain he’d peered at the sunlit tree and felt his heart leap when the girl turned and smiled. He smiled back but shyly averted his gaze a second later.
They made camp among a hundred wagons in a muddy clearing called Big Soldier Rendezvous. There were many hundreds more head of cattle than men, and the sound of mooing and shouting and wood-chopping was everywhere. Jeremiah and Ruth, two years his senior, had been trying to fathom the dynamics between their parents since the old man had returned unannounced after a decade’s absence, and particularly during these three days as Mother and Father had sat in utter silence on the bench behind the team of oxen. “Perhaps God is giving them another chance,” Jeremiah whispered to her in the creaking wagon hold.
“Or perhaps they’re just a couple of cuckoos,” she whispered back.
There was talk of this being the last place to find firewood, yet there were so many fires going as to conjure the children of Israel making burnt offering to God before setting out for the unknown. Men stood on barrels and buckets and shouted to gathered clumps of men and women, and Jeremiah recognized a kind of rudimentary governance taking shape, arguments and voting and elections of wagon captains, oratorical listings of rules and punishments, advice about water and provenance. He listened as he wandered from clump to clump, looking for the girl with the pigtails. There were rhetorical flourishes calling upon the greatness of our founding leaders in their creation of a true democracy; there were biblical allusions to the push westward to a promised land ordained by the highest; and there were commonsense speeches by the drovers and cattlemen about taking care of the hooves of ox teams. At times it seemed to Jeremiah that it was less a wagon train than a cattle drive as he listened to the bovine moans and heard the boys on horses yell their commands to the horned beasts that surrounded their camp.
He had seen this many people only once before, in Saint Joseph before the jump, but here the crowd expressed a different sort of excitement than when engaged in the commerce of a municipality. They were off to new lives, every one of them, by God! And for Jeremiah the hopefulness and delight of this new beginning seemed to come less out of the crucible of these many fires than from the momentary glimpse of a girl with pigtails waving beneath a willow tree.
After the many speeches and the dinners and cleanup, as the night deepened and the stars flew among the bare branches with the fire sparks, a mournful melody floated among the pot-clanks and laughter, a rough-edged fiddle-sawing. Slow and sad, at