just a pack of henpecked utopians.”
“Sounds like a direct quote from the esteemed Editor Stiles, Danvers.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Well, I happen to agree with the man on occasion.” He leaned to his left and spat tobacco juice onto the porch. “Rare occasion.”
Since the arrival of the Reverend Harris in Santa Rosa in 1875, the word utopian had taken on suspect connotations throughout the region. “I hope,” Jeremiah said as he untied his horse and mounted her, “that you won’t confuse the faithful in the Fountain Grove Community with those of us who favor the rights of women to vote, same as a man.”
“If God wanted us equal he would’ve made us equal, but he didn’t.” His face was red. “Besides, the damned letter’s addressed to you, too!”
Right, Jeremiah mused, it’s addressed to me. Not to Sheriff Charles Danvers. He crossed the square and started back up the valley. The mare was sweating, and he decided to take her down to his favorite waters between home and town. The fields soon gave way to the aromatic bay and oak trees by the sparkling creek. He dismounted and let the horse wade and drink as he broke the wax seal.
This was a deep bend dear to Jeremiah’s youth, a place where he’d come many summer days after field labor to swim and read the books the professor had given him, a kind of baptism of cold mountain water and slanted sunlight mixed with the words of the long dead, perceived through the dappled movement of trees and water. Now, in midlife, he sat on a granite boulder familiar to those youthful afternoons and puzzled over a missive whose entirety was a single biblical reference: Deuteronomy 22:22.
Although he’d been somewhat self-schooled in divinity, he couldn’t recall the specific passage. He knew it indicated one of the Mosaic laws. Who in the wide world had had the time or the inclination to send a Digger Indian boy with that telegram and to leave this note? He wondered if Lucinda had a notion. If this were a kind of joke...
He smiled. One man in his acquaintance, whom he hadn’t seen in decades, was returning to Sonoma County today, a pedagogue who made light of the Bible and the tenets of the Old Testament. Jeremiah knew that this sort of mysterious skulduggery wasn’t beyond his old mentor, Elijah Applewood, who had once, during a monotonous and ill-sung ballad in a San Francisco saloon, slipped him a note bearing a single notation: Hebrews 13:8.
To which he later referred, and read, and laughed aloud now recalling: Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever.
The morning was rapidly gaining heat, the dust rising as he mounted the mare again. He anticipated the professor’s mocking assessment of this life Jeremiah had saddled himself with: starting a new family in this backwater frontier town so late in life, teaching local urchins how to read and cipher, writing occasional reports for a local newspaper while secretly writing his epic poem, and taking over his father’s farm after the old man’s passing. And he wondered if the old cynic had ever truly felt the pull of such a woman’s love, the heart’s compass drawing him always back to her
whose freckled cheeks and sky—
• SIX •
May 1845
blue eyes might appear above the breast-high grass
all of a sudden like some gleaming bluebird’s wings as he made his way through the green sea, parting the fibrous waves with his arms like a swimmer, and his heart would pound in his chest. There were entire days of walking silently in that high grass and watching for glimpses of the girl in pigtails, called Cindy by her pretty mother and little siblings, called Lucy by her pale father; there were hours of struggling to breathe and joining Mother on the buckboard to recover; there was the handsome gentleman named Will, his love rival and obvious superior and even, in many ways, his idol, riding his chestnut stallion beside the captain, who called orders from his black mount and urged haste as the water bags shrunk; and there was the huge sky the color of the girl’s eyes, with glistering clouds moving overhead like great white covered wagons themselves.
This was Kansas. There were no more night dances or songs or fires beyond the meager cook sites. There were no more Indian encounters, but cattle kept disappearing, and the emigrants blamed the loss on the Kaw, and some of them thanked the Lord it was just steers and not people getting spirited away in the night by the red man. The family cow took on a desperate expression, her long eyelashes fluttering in panic as Father offered her the daily bowl of water, and later Jeremiah wondered if the poor creature had received some premonition of her imminent death. The poor, lovely, gentle cow that Mother had milked and sung German songs to for some five years, and whose milk was churned to butter in a bucket by the simple rocking of the emigrant wagon, hadn’t a chance. It was hitched to the fate of a cursed man.
The boy was beginning to see how much like Job the old man truly was: misfortune sought him in particular among the tribe of men. His oxen split their hooves and needed tar, which required more firewood; his wagon wheels wobbled and split their spokes, even though he’d been trained as a wheelwright and fashioned them himself; his only surviving son wheezed like death each evening while his daughter sassed his requests and did as she pleased. And when the first Kansas storm hit, it seemed God had seized a special opportunity to punish Daniel McKinley.
One moment there was the bright sun on endless fields of grass and wildflowers, and rich birdsong, especially that of a large new bird that darted through the meadow, a swift hunter called the lark; then, of a sudden, silence, and darkness was on the face of the Kansas plain as on the first morning of creation. Minutes later wind and rain lashed them, and seconds after its onset men and beasts were attacked by a fusillade of hailstones, many the size of a child’s fist. There was a hubbub of yelling and grasping at the wagon roofs, which were trying to take flight like great flapping birds themselves. There was a flash of light, which gave the entire table of land and the frantic emigrants a ghostly aspect, and a sudden clap, which seemed to come from inside the boy’s head.
In Missouri he had known to stay away from the tallest trees during thunderstorms, but in Kansas there was nothing taller than a Conestoga wagon to attract lightning. The bolts spread like spider-webs in the air and now and then boomed in the boiling sky with such force as to shake the soul out of a man. The hairs of his body rose and tingled, and he swore that a blue aura passed along the metal wagon rims and rifle barrels on the buckboard, sizzling like bacon in a pan, though no others could verify this impression.
The boy watched as one thick, crooked finger of light reached down from the black heavens and turned their brown-and-white cow into a lantern. Her wide eyes and horns burst from her steaming skull, her body glowed red-orange, and there was a sudden smell of burned and roasted flesh.
Then the storm passed as quickly as it had come. Old Daniel stood above the twisted corpse of the milk cow and gazed heavenward. “McKinley,” the stinking, homely man in badger fur named Smith asked, “why you suppose it struck only your cow and nothing else?”
The old man made no reply.
THE ICE BALLS were gathered like gold nuggets into pots and pans and saved as drinking water. The cow was roasted on the spot, and by the time her life became sustenance for man the green sea had lifted its battered leaves and was steaming heavenward with the smoke from Daniel’s fire. The old man handed the leather tome to his son and requested an appropriate reading before those gathered about the spit. Jeremiah hadn’t realized that his father even knew of his ability to do so.
“And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor,” the boy read from Genesis, “the Lord said in His heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” He could hear murmurs of appreciation among those sharing the meat. He hoped the girl with pigtails might be hidden somewhere behind the grown-ups, and his cheeks burned as he continued,