She’s always controlled, she’s always confined Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”
Jeremiah found the source: the girl with pigtails, singing with eyes closed beside the fiddler, who looked to be her father. Her voice was so haunting and beautiful that Jeremiah had to sit in the dirt and close his eyes to take in the rest:
“Oh, I’m just a poor girl, my fortune is sad, I’ve always been courted by the Wagoner’s lad He’s courted me daily, by night and by day, And now he is loading and going away.”
Directly the fiddle turned bright and quick and was echoed by the sound of hands clapping in unison and voices shouting. Jeremiah opened his eyes and saw a good many people dancing by firelight, ladies in their long work dresses and tight bonnets being turned about by bearded men in suspenders and baggy breeches, dogs barking excitedly, a few men lifting a jug and passing it down the line. Among the dancers was one clean-shaven fellow in a waistcoat and fancy collar who seemed to give the ladies the most wondrous turns as he moved up and down the line. He had high boots and tight pants, round cheeks and full lips, and blond curls that bounced across his forehead as he twirled the girls and ladies. Jeremiah looked upon him in awe, and his sister Ruth exclaimed that she’d never seen such a gentleman.
The word became flesh for the first time in his life: gentleman. Jeremiah had possibly never seen one until now, such a robust, well-turned, powerful, elegant, handsome figure of a man. He had a broad, intelligent face and an erect bearing. He moved with the grace of a stallion among clumsy oxen, taking the women in his arms one by one until, with the onset of a slow waltz tune, he bowed deeply and took the hand of the girl with the pigtails.
In a moment Jeremiah felt the hope of the new world come to an end. The girl smiled up at the beau and joined him in dance. The boy’s sinuses swelled and his lungs rattled. He turned away and bent double with coughing, making to slink back to the wagon and fall in a defeated heap, but a hand smacked him smartly across the back, nearly knocking him to his face in mud, while another kept him from striking the earth by gripping his back collar. “You all right?”
Ruth had been raised chopping wood and swinging a mattock into pine-root-infested soil, and her back-slap came with authority. She laid into him several times, but he was unable to yelp for her to stop. A good number of people laughed at her performance of filial affection, and one young wit remarked, “If that boy ain’t dyin’ already, she’ll make sure he gits to heaven fast,” which made Ruth stop.
“He’s got the agues,” she said in her defense.
Jeremiah felt the fellow’s strong hands help him to a seat on a wooden toolbox. The man had a new wisp of beard and a dirty shirt made of sacking. “You all right, boy?” Jeremiah nodded. “You think yer sister kin dance as well she kin beat people half to death?” He heard Ruth huff indignantly behind him as several people laughed. “You think if I ast her to waltz she’d toss me around the ring like I was a sack of flour?”
Jeremiah took an immediate liking to the fellow. “Mayhap,” he rasped.
Ruth was the one Mother called sassy, her obstinate mule-girl. Mary and Grace had found husbands and farms of their own, but Ruth had never seemed marriageable in Mother’s or Jeremiah’s eyes until that night’s waltz with the big-shouldered, wispy-bearded fellow. He watched them turn about stiffly by the firelight among the many couples, and he watched the willow girl spin in perfect grace with the handsome gentleman, and the beauty of their dancing warmed his bruised heart. The agony of being sickly and unfit, of being merely fourteen and pimply and small for his age into the bargain, was alleviated by this moment of pure observation. How lovely they looked in the firelight!
THE NEXT MORNING he sat cleaning the family flintlock, a Kentucky long rifle that had been his maternal grandfather’s, when David, the wispy-bearded fellow, asked him to join in a deer hunt before the wagons got ready to roll. He spoke to the boy, but his eyes searched the wagon.
“She’s gathering wood,” Jeremiah told him. David’s cheeks flushed.
They were joined by three other young men, including the handsome gentleman, and Jeremiah felt deep gratitude for being included, even though he knew his invitation was a product of merely having been present when David had come sparking for Ruth. The other three complained of headaches from drinking corn whiskey, and the handsome fellow, whose name was William, spoke of the finer spirits available in his homeland to the south. He had a sweet accent such as Jeremiah had never heard before, and round cherub cheeks, and golden curls that bounced on his forehead beneath the brim of his straw hat. The five of them tromped past the cattle and through a copse of small trees, the fellows bragging about spirits at first, then about the girls they’d danced with, then about girls from their hometowns. Jeremiah listened breathlessly as William was queried by a homely fellow in badger fur about the pretty lass with the pigtails.
“I will grant you that she’s a flower at the cusp of maidenhood. An Ohio girl with a proper education.”
“How far did you git last night?” Smith, the man in badger fur, asked. The others chuckled nervously.
“A gentleman doesn’t describe his affairs in detail,” William replied, and he gave Jeremiah a wink.
“My gut aches,” Badger-Fur Smith muttered. A moment later he unleashed a torrent of vomit against the trunk of a tree.
“Mary and Joseph, save me!” David leaped aside to avoid getting splashed.
“Whiskey,” Smith said between two blasts of regurgitation. “What the hell we got here?”
In the clearing before them stood three short men in animal hides. Their skin was dark, their hair tar black, their noses large, and their hands outstretched. “Them’s Kaw,” a young squat fellow named Stewart said. “I reckon they expect tribute fer us hunting their land, as the captain said they would.”
Smith wrinkled his features and spat close to the feet of the Indians, who approached, nonetheless, with hands out. “Hell you talkin’ ’bout? Tribute! By God!”
As the ugly man grumbled Jeremiah gazed in wonder at the dark-skinned strangers and didn’t think to step back with his fellows before one of the Indians had a hand in his breeches pocket and another on his flintlock.
“Hey,” he said, yanking back, “that’s my grandpap’s gun!” He heard the clicking of hammers behind him as the Kaw released the rifle stock but remained with outstretched hand.
“Put your piece down, Smith.” William came up beside Jeremiah with a beautiful pistol pointing at the man who’d ransacked the boy’s empty pocket. “They may not have any manners, but Stewart’s right about the custom.” With his other hand he tossed a plug of tobacco into the grass near the trio. “If we’re to consider this their land, we must expect to pay something.”
Smith growled through his matted whiskers, “I’d as soon kill ’em.”
“And start a durned war, you idiot?” David had stepped to Jeremiah’s other side. “Ain’t you heard a single one of the Oregon Emigration Society rules?”
The Kaw walked back into the trees with the tobacco plug. “I’d as soon shoot and skin ’em,” Smith grumbled.
THE WAGONS moved out behind the dust cloud of grazing cattle, single file and slow among the scrub oaks and pine flats. In draws and gullies and rises the old man had them disembark and push or pull the old converted hay wagon, and that first day outside Big Soldier he had Jeremiah and Ruth and himself simply walk beside the oxen the duration of that spring afternoon until they camped at sundown. Mother fretted over the boy’s catarrh, but after some time the wheezing became less frequent. Jeremiah had never walked much beyond the half mile to the river from their cabin; that afternoon the old man guessed they’d stamped a good five or six miles.
David called on Ruth during camp and tried to carry her firewood, but she knocked him aside with a hip. Not so hard as to discourage his attentions during supper, however,