wrist got tired from holding his head. Then she lay Bob’s head back on his pillow, and ate the rest of the chicken soup herself.
76
BIG ZWEY WAS WORRIED that Elmira had left the baby. When she came out to the wagon, she didn’t have it. “Hitch the team and let’s go,” she said, and that was all she said. He did it, but he felt confused.
“Ain’t we gonna take the baby?” he asked shyly, just before they left.
Elmira didn’t answer. She had no breath to answer with, she was so tired. Walking downstairs and out to the wagon had taken all her strength. Zwey had to lift her into the wagon, at that, and she sat propped against the buffalo skins, too tired even to care about the smell. She was so tired that she felt like she wasn’t there. She couldn’t even tell Zwey to start—Luke had to do it.
“Let’s go, Zwey,” he said. “She don’t want the baby.”
Zwey started the wagon, and they were soon out of sight of the house, but he was bothered. He kept looking back at Ellie, propped against the buffalo skins, her eyes wide open. Why didn’t she want her baby? It was a puzzle. He had never understood the whole business, but he knew mothers took care of babies, just as husbands took care of wives. In his eyes he had married Ellie, and he intended to take good care of her. He felt he was her husband. They had come all that way together in the wagon. Luke had tried to marry her too, but Zwey had soon stopped that, and Luke had been behaving a lot better since.
Luke had tied his horse beside the wagon, and he rode on the wagon seat beside Zwey, who kept looking around to see if Ellie was asleep. She wasn’t moving, but her eyes were still wide open.
“What are you looking at?” Luke asked.
“I wisht she’d brought the baby,” Zwey said. “I always wanted us to have one.”
The way he said it struck Luke as curious. It was almost as if Zwey thought the baby was his.
“Why would you care? It ain’t yours,” Luke said, to scotch that suspicion. Even if Zwey had got up his nerve to approach Ellie, which he doubted, they hadn’t been on the road long enough to make a baby.
“We’re married,” Zwey answered. “I guess it’s ours.”
A suspicion dawned on Luke which was even more curious—the suspicion that Zwey didn’t even understand about men and women. They had spent days around the buffalo herds when the bulls and cows were mating, and yet Zwey had evidently never connected such goings-on with humans. Luke remembered that Zwey never went with whores. He mainly just watched the wagon when the other hunters went to town. Zwey had always been considered the dumbest of the dumb, but Luke knew that none of the hunters had suspected him of being that dumb. That much dumbness was hard to believe—Luke wanted to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood.
“Now, wait a minute, Zwey,” he said. “Why do you think that baby was yours?”
Zwey was silent a long time. Luke was smiling, as he did when he wanted to make fun of him. It didn’t ordinarily much bother him that Luke made fun of him, but he didn’t want him to make fun about the baby. He didn’t want Luke to talk about it. It was painful enough that she had had it and then gone off and left it. He decided not to answer.
“What’s the matter with you, Zwey?” Luke said. “You and Ellie ain’t really married. You ain’t married to somebody just because she comes on a trip with you.”
Zwey began to feel very sad—it might be true, what Luke said. Yet he liked to think that he and Ellie were married.
“Well, we are,” he said finally.
Luke began to laugh. He turned to Ellie, who was still sitting with her back against the skins.
“He thinks that baby’s his,” Luke said. “He really thinks it’s his. I guess he thinks all he had to do was look at you to make it happen.”
Then Luke laughed a long time. Zwey felt sad, but he didn’t say any more. Luke could always find something to laugh at him about.
Elmira began to feel cold. She started to shiver and reached for the pile of blankets in the wagon, but she was too weak even to untangle the blankets.
“Help me, boys,” she said. “I’m real cold.”
Zwey immediately handed the reins