Where the Lost Wander_ A Novel - Amy Harmon Page 0,6
I touch it, but she doesn’t complain, and the white man brings us blankets when she refuses to move or follow him back inside, though he beckons us both. In the morning we are both stretched out beneath the sky, but my mother’s eyes are fixed and her body is cold.
The white man takes my mother away, and his woman takes me inside the little house. I am empty. My belly, my mind, my eyes. I do not cry because I am empty. I am convinced I am dreaming. Two little girls, their hair woven into skinny braids that touch their shoulders, stare at me. They are small, smaller than me, and their eyes are blue like those of the white man who took my mother. The white woman is dark eyed and dark haired, like me, though her skin is like the moon, and her cheeks are pink. I look at her instead of the blue-eyed children and hope she will feed me before I wake. I am empty.
“Is he an Indian, Mama?” one girl asks the white woman.
“He is a boy without a family, Sarah.”
“Are we going to be his family?” The littlest girl is missing two teeth, and she makes a hissing sound when she speaks, but I understand her well enough. I’ve spent plenty of time around white children.
“What is his name?” the toothless one asks.
“His name is John Lowry, Hattie,” the white woman says.
“That’s not an Indian name.” Sarah wrinkles her nose. “That’s Papa’s name.”
“Yes. Well. He’s Papa’s son,” the white woman answers, her voice soft. I begin to cry, a keening that makes the woman’s daughters cover their ears. The little one begins to cry with me, and I am not empty anymore. I am full of terror and water. It streams from my eyes and my mouth.
“Will you come back this time, John?” my father asks. His eyes are on the ledger in front of him, but his hand is still, the pencil cocked, and I don’t understand.
“I’ll only be gone an hour. Where’s Leroy? Do you need me out back?”
“No. Not now. Not that. Will you come back . . . to St. Joe?”
I stiffen at the words, as if he is telling me he doesn’t want me to return, but when he raises his pale eyes to mine, I see his strain, glittering like sun on the water. His face is expressionless, his words flat, but his eyes are so bright with emotion I am taken aback.
“Why wouldn’t I come back?” I say.
He nods once as if that is answer enough, and I am convinced the odd conversation is over. I turn again to go, but he speaks again.
“I would understand . . . if you didn’t. There’s a whole big world out there.” He raises his hand slightly, indicating everything west of the wide Missouri River that runs past St. Joseph. “I hear there’s a Pawnee village near Fort Kearny.”
“You want me to go live with the Pawnee?” My voice is so dry it doesn’t indicate the layer of wet that runs beneath. “Is that where you think I belong?”
His shoulders fall slightly. “No. I don’t want that.”
I laugh. Incredulous. I don’t think I am bitter. I have not suffered greatly. I have no reason to lash out or try to wound him. But I am surprised, and in my surprise I discover there is also pain.
After my mother died, I would sometimes steal away to the Pawnee village and visit my grandmother, but the Pawnee did not like me, and they wanted me to bring them things. They were hungry, and I was not. I took all of Jennie’s flour and sugar once so they would welcome me. I knew my father would get more, and the Pawnee had so little. Jennie beat my backside with a switch, tears streaming down her cheeks, Hattie and Sarah watching from the window. Jennie said if she didn’t punish me, I would do it again.
I did do it again, despite the licking. My father always got more, though it took him a while and there was no bread on the table for weeks.
Not long after that, we moved to St. Joseph, and my father sold everything to buy a good-quality jack donkey for breeding. Independence, Missouri, farther south, already had plenty of breeders and muleteers. St. Joseph was smaller but still perfectly situated to become a jumping-off point for the Oregon Territory, and he told Jennie that with the new hunger to