was struck up after camp cleanup, and the couples danced in lines by firelight, his sister with the jokester David, William with the girl with the radiant smile framed by pigtails. Small children held hands and spun about near the adults; drunks slapped knees and hooted. Jeremiah rubbed his sore feet and legs and watched the others beat the ground with their boots until a gunshot echoed through the night sky.
The dance stopped, and voices shouted from the west. William embraced the girl, released her to the clutch of well-dressed children and adults who must have been her family, and took up the elegant pistol and rifle he’d set against a wagon wheel. Jeremiah followed him among several men, a few holding oil lanterns.
“They done stole two head of cattle,” a deep voice growled.
“And now you skeered half the herd off into the hills,” another voice shouted. Jeremiah and the others reached a pair of men standing near what looked to be a twisted log. A fellow with a cow hat cursed and hollered at the other, whose badger coat gave off a distinctive odor reminiscent of the morning’s hunt. “And you was supposed to skeer ’em. Not shoot ’em!”
Badger-Fur Smith held his rifle to his broad chest. “They’s thieves,” he said.
The cluster of men parted to make room for the arrival of a small fellow in black with a hatchet face and blazing eyes. Jeremiah knew him only as the captain and had heard him shouting orders from his saddle the day before. The group became quiet as the captain stepped past Smith and knelt in the grass beyond the circle of lamplight. The boy suddenly realized that the twisted log behind Smith was a human body. The captain lifted the man’s bare arm and let it drop.
The boy was seized by a sudden nausea, and he thought of Smith’s blasts of regurgitation that morning. The group remained silent as the captain knelt beside the corpse. Finally he stood and entered the lamp circle.
“You’re relieved of guard duty and fined one day’s provender,” he said to Smith.
“What the hell—” the man started, but the captain cut him off:
“Further insubordination and you’re cut off with my order to shoot you on sight if you follow the train.”
Smith’s squinty eyes exploded open. “Fer killin’ a goddamned thief Injun?”
The captain turned his narrow face from Smith and searched the gathering. “Where’s that old feller? McKinley?” Jeremiah was dumbstruck to see his father step forward into the light. “What you know about Kaw funerals?”
The gaunt old man pulled on his long whiskers before responding. He knelt beside the corpse near the captain. “They bury ’em,” he said at length. “Leave a pile of stones atop and some remembrance, I reckon. That ’ere necklace would do.” He touched the dead man’s neck, and another spasm went through Jeremiah’s innards. “I’ve seen them leave a little food in there, such as they’d have something to eat in the other world.”
“Smith,” the captain said, “you dig the hole and see to McKinley’s wishes.” The ugly man started to grumble, but the leader’s glare silenced him. “I need five men with horses to help round up the strays,” he said to the assemblage. William and David stepped forward. “Follow me.” Jeremiah made off in their direction, but his father called him back.
“Boy,” old Daniel said, “come give a hand.”
“I was going to help with the cattle.”
“You ain’t a need to those men. We sold the horses fer them ox.” In the periphery of the lamplight his father’s beard and glinting eyes were the only things visible about him. Smith stood with one boot on the corpse and arms crossed, cursing softly. “Git the pick and shovel.”
“I’m feeling sick.”
“Catch a breath, then bring the tools.”
Smith cursed loudly. “The hell I’m a’gonna bury no stinkin’ horse-thief savage!” He kicked the corpse. “Captain kin jest kiss my rosy red afore I bury this thing.”
“Leave me and the boy to do it,” the old man said. Smith stomped off. Jeremiah sucked in his breath. The injustice of the situation overwhelmed him. There was young, stinking Badger-Fur Smith, big and brawny and foul-mouthed, just ordered by the captain to dig a grave for the man he’d shot, getting out of the job; here was a sickly boy and an old man, whose first wife and kids had been murdered by Indians, left to do it in his stead.
“It’s not our job, Pap,” he said. “The captain ordered Smith to do it.”
“The captain can kneel and kiss my nethers,” Smith called over his shoulder as he lumbered off.
“Git the mattock and spade,” old Daniel said.
“I won’t,” the boy said.
THE NEXT MORNING the boy’s disobedience was never mentioned, but he felt its presence in his mother’s grimace and his sister’s smirk. For thousands of years, since the children of Israel had fled Egypt, the boy thought, rules forbidding such misbehavior had been clear and carried a severe penalty, but now, as they were heading toward a new world, they seemed open to some debate. What right did an old stranger, this man who had abandoned them all for a decade, have to give him orders, even if he was his father? He felt the conflict work its way across Mother’s features, she who had encouraged his free thinking, and prepared his defense should the subject arise, but it never did. The old man simply stared ahead as he led the team.
There was a sudden cloudburst as they trudged forward, such that the rain gathered and poured off the branches and the brims of his father’s and his own felt hats, and just as it stopped the trees disappeared. They walked in dripping silence beside the oxen, under a sky that grew huge and blue to the north and black with thunder-clouds to the south, and onto a dazzling, rolling green sea of grass such as the boy had never imagined.
There were fields near home between the river willows and the woods, which he had always loved, but here was the entire round earth turning under the endless heavens. Here was the very face of God shining before him! In all his readings of the Good Book, in all the stories of surrendered souls, he had never quite understood how small the will and acts of man were before those of God until now.
The wagon and cattle trains creaked and rattled and disappeared in the immensity. Simultaneous with this humbling first vision of the prairie came a sudden shame for disobeying his father, for the small and scheming vanity and willfulness that had caused him to abandon the old man to the work of burying the dead while he watched the young men mount horses and stood near the pretty girl with the pigtails as she waved them off. What trials and terrors had his father faced in his soul’s journey, the boy wondered as he watched the old man stride forward onto the ocean of
grass sparkling
• FIVE •
6:30 AM
with the last of morning’s dew,
the gold and green and umber stalks among clover and Queen Anne’s lace made the fallow field jewel-encrusted. He lured the mare from her grazing to the stall and saddled her. The ornate face of his timepiece indicated that it was 6:35.
He took her at a brisk trot along the carriage lane and down the hillside, across the shallow ford, and up to the wagon road toward Sonoma Town. The cookhouse smoke from the Springs Hotel came to him a mile down the road from across the valley, mingled with the sweet pine needles of the steep eastern slope. A mile after that the valley opened toward the southern horizon, where, from the higher points, the broad San Francisco Bay could be seen joining the sky.
The estate of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, called Lachryma Montis, shone like a wedding cake against the dry mountain backstop of Sonoma, between town and cemetery. It was strange to think