to wash . . . without Naomi. How about we wait to tell her I’m awake, okay?”
Webb fetches a bar of soap and digs through my saddlebags for clean clothes. He keeps watch for me as I wash in the creek, stripping off my soiled things until I’m naked as the day I was born and almost as helpless. By the time I’ve washed and wrung out my clothes and dressed myself in the dry ones, I’m shivering and unsteady, but Webb slings his arm around my waist and pulls my arm over his shoulders, providing a crutch as we make our way back to the camp.
NAOMI
John often sleeps in a little tent that he breaks down and packs up each day, but when it storms or the wind blows, he finds shelter beneath Mr. Abbott’s wagon. He is among the first to wake and is usually packed and ready before the rest of us, often helping others gather their stock and yoke their teams.
I know all his habits and patterns; I have been shameless in my interest. So when I see his tent, still pitched and standing off to the side, though the camp has been stirring for hours, I know something is wrong. I stand abruptly, my duties forgotten, and stride toward it, trying not to run, to draw unwanted attention.
Crossing the distance between where I was and the little opening of his tent feels like walking another mile in the Platte, my feet on shifting silt, my legs heavy and bogged down by fear, and when I call his name, it is a shrill bleat that hurts my throat. He doesn’t answer, and I do not hesitate, parting the canvas sides and crawling inside.
It is just as I feared, and he is already vomiting, the final stages for Abigail. She didn’t last an hour after she began retching. But John has enough strength to insist I leave, enough fire to push me away, and I take heart in that.
I spend the remainder of the day at his side, leaving only to gather medicine and tell my family they will have to leave me behind until John is improved. Ma understands, Pa too, though he grouses about the impropriety of my care.
“Surely Mr. Abbott can see to his needs. After all, they are family,” he protests, but Grant Abbott keeps his distance, worried that he too will find himself ailing, and Pa says nothing more. Arguments about indecency ring hollow when death comes to call.
It ends up that the entire wagon train remains at Elm Creek, only eight miles from where we crossed the Platte two days earlier. John is not the only one stricken down by cholera. Several others, including Lucy Caldwell Hines, Daniel’s sister, have succumbed to the deadly plague. Lucy dies just before sunset.
Ma sends Webb to tell me—for some reason the children have more resistance to the disease—and I leave John’s side to stand beside a hole in the earth, watching as my sister-in-law is put in the ground by poor Adam Hines, who has the same stunned expression that Warren still wears about his eyes. She is clothed in her wedding dress, blue silk with lace collar and cuffs, and rolled in a rug instead of a winding cloth. The rug once graced Elmeda’s parlor, but there is nothing else, unless we want to start tearing apart their wagons.
Lucy said she would wear the dress again when we reached California and attended Sunday meetings. It is Sunday today, and I suppose a funeral is a sort of worship. Deacon Clarke, who is not well himself, says something akin to the words he said for Abigail, and everyone hitches out a wobbly rendition of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Ma’s the only one who knows every word. Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, darkness be over me, my rest a stone, yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to thee.
I don’t sing. My voice has all the beauty of a honking goose, and the words of the hymn weaken my control. I don’t cry either; I can’t. I cared for Lucy, cared for Abigail, but grief is draining. I am hoarding my strength and my stamina for life, and I will not spend it on death. Gotta get your mind right, Naomi May. If all I have is my will, then I must use it well. For Ma. For Wolfe. For my brothers. And for John Lowry, who is still