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I COULDN’T EAT SUPPER that night. It didn’t seem right, with Mama lying in her grave just a bit away from us. Nobody pushed me, though Mrs. French did say, “Lizzy, on the Trail you eat and partake of water when you can, dear. It has nothing to do with wanting to. It has to do with staying alive.”

I wasn’t so sure just then that I wanted to stay alive. Then I looked at Daddy bent over the fire, staring into it, not eating, either, and I thought, I have to stay alive for him. Mama would want it. Can’t let him go on his own. He himself forgets to eat sometimes.

“Leave her be,” Daddy said. And, for the moment, I felt my old love for him.

Left be, I just sat there and gazed out, past the fire in the pit, at Mama’s grave and wondered what her family would think of her lying here in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, when she’d been so alive and lovely back in Independence, growing her roses in the garden, starting the women’s literary guild, and baking all those cakes for the church fairs.

“Will you write Uncle William and tell him she’s dead?” I asked Daddy. He said he would, soon’s we got to Santa Fe.

I wondered what Uncle William would say. Mama was his favorite sibling. Yet he’d approved of our trip. But then, he was an adventurer. For the most part he ran Bent’s New Fort on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. But the house in Independence had been his; Mama had run it for him. And when he came home it had been so exciting. He’d sometimes bring friends from Fort Bent. And gifts. He had brought my pony, Ben.

Mama was a Bent. Her family was of consequence in Independence. Her father had been a fur trapper, who’d become rich and had three Indian wives. I’d once met the last one, Grandma Adalina, a Blackfoot, at the time of Grandpa William’s death.

I have Cheyenne and Blackfoot cousins that I don’t even know. And I’m thirteen already.

I have some Blackfoot in me. Mama always said it was the part that didn’t cry when other girls did. But by the time I came along I think it was probably washed clear out of my blood. By the time I came along the family had lost most of its wealth, though they still owned the largest mercantile business in Independence. Mama’s brothers still traded in furs, sold blankets from New Mexico, drove New Mexican sheep to Missouri, and traded horses and mules.

After the war General William Tecumseh Sherman wanted to give Negro families forty acres of land each, on the coast and riverbanks from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. So he issued General Order Number 15. I was just born. Mama and Daddy told me how he took our plantation, which he’d ruined, anyway, and gave it to the Negroes. So Daddy and Mama went to Independence. Mama’s family gave Daddy a job in their mercantile. We lived in their large house, with the porch that went all the way around. Uncle William was always off somewhere having adventures, so the house was mostly ours. But Daddy went about with his spirit cast down because he could no longer keep a roof over his family’s heads.

One day a gunman came to the store and held Daddy up. Daddy had refused to use a gun since the war. The man got away with the robbery. Uncle William was disappointed that Daddy couldn’t hold the robber off. And I was disappointed that the robber wasn’t Jesse James. I would have been the envy of every girl in Independence if he had been. And somehow it was never the same in the house in Independence again.

Finally Daddy said there was nothing for it, we must go west. To seek gold in Colorado’s hills. Mama wanted to stay in Independence. She didn’t want to leave her brother’s home, her church, her friends, her literary ladies. How she cried. How I cried.

I was crying because my Best Friend Ever Cassie was there. Cassie’s mother was soon to have a baby, and Cassie and I had talked for hours of how we’d care for it. I always longed for a little sister. Now I missed the tree-lined streets of Independence, the stores, the steepled brick courthouse, the constant flow of emigrant wagons coming through—the way their drivers would shoot off guns to announce their arrival and everybody would go out to greet them. Sometimes we’d take a weary family into our home for the night.

When we left I knew I’d never see Cassie again. She ran after the wagon, crying. I hung over the tailgate, reaching for the paper she was holding out to me. I just managed to grab it. “Don’t open until you are lonely,” she yelled.

I watched her until she was a small speck in the dust, and then I opened it. It was her very best reward poster for Jesse James. The one issued by the Pinkerton men right after he robbed the Missouri-Pacific Railroad of over fifteen thousand dollars.

Tacked onto it was a small bit of paper. I know you will cherish this. I’ll take care of your cats, don’t worry.

I had to leave my cats behind with Cassie. I had three, and a whole passel of kittens. I begged to be allowed to take one kitten, but Daddy said no. Oh, how I would have loved just one kitten!

I was allowed to take Ben, my saddle pony, for he’d be useful on the Trail. I rode him beside the wagon. But then Elinora would get jealous and cry. I never saw such a girl for crying. So I had to sit in the wagon with her or let her ride Ben. Once she fell off and near killed herself, so Mama wouldn’t let her ride anymore. After all, you couldn’t deliver a girl with a broken head to an archbishop.

Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy knew Mama’s family. And though we weren’t Catholic, he knew Mama was a good church lady and Daddy wanted to make a trip to trade on the Gila Trail, then head for Colorado. So the Bishop wrote and asked Daddy to make a stopover at Santa Fe and bring his grandniece to the girls school there. He was the bishop of the whole Southwest, Daddy said. And he would pay well for safe delivery of Elinora. So Daddy saw his way not to accept any money from Mama’s brothers for our trip. With our caravan we had four mules, carrying cargo, books and paper, and supplies for the girls school—cutlery, dinnerware, woolens and calico, even canned goods.

The whole trip up to the time Mama died took fifty days. And we still had more to go. We could have taken the train to southeast Colorado, the farthest point the railroad went. But Bishop Lamy wrote that he wanted his grandniece to “witness the travel on the Santa Fe Trail,” as he had so often done, before the railroads took over.

Elinora knew, all the while, that she was Miss Importance on this trip. Every whim of hers was satisfied. If she wanted to stop and pick wildflowers, we did so. Mama and I shared the same basin of water to wash as we crossed fifty miles of dry plain, but Elinora would have her own. At Fort Union Mama was already sick, but Elinora must be taken through the fort to see it.

Only one time did she not get her way. She had wanted to travel the Mountain Branch route to see Bent’s New Fort and all the trappers, Indians, and military men there. Daddy said no. The Cimarron Cutoff was a hundred miles shorter. But I think the real reason was because Daddy just didn’t want to see Uncle William.

 

I WAS FEEDING BEN and seeing to him for the night when I noticed Elinora talking with Daddy a bit away from the fire. She wanted something again. Probably to stop tomorrow at some stream and do a watercolor for her uncle. She had her drawing paper and watercolors with her. She fancied herself an artist. I know Daddy wanted to get on with the trip. It was already the beginning of October.

Oh, it would be so good getting shut of Elinora.

I stayed awhile with Ben. I had a bit of sugar for him. I put my face close to his, and he knew I was grieving. Horses know. Animals know, Mama always said.

“We’re going on to Colorado,” I told him. “We’re going to find gold, and someday we’ll come back here and find Mama and take her home for a proper burial.”

By the time I got into the wagon, Elinora was already snuggled—in my traveling bed, the one Mama had made by sewing two comforters together. One side was lined with a warm Indian blanket and the other was covered with canvas so water would roll right off it.

“It’s going to be cold tonight,” Elinora said. “You wouldn’t want me to come down with the fever, would you? Your daddy promised my uncle I’d be delivered safely.”

“Keep the old thing,” I said. “I’ll use Mama’s.” My mother had made one for herself, too.

“See that fire outside? Your daddy’s burning it because your mama died of the fever.” She pulled up part of the wagon canvas so I could see the fire. It was sending sparks into the surrounding dark.

I settled down on the other side of the wagon, in some quilts, with a pillow. Oh, how I wished I had a kitten! I heard the murmur of voices outside as the others settled into the wagons. My daddy would take the first watch, then sleep under our wagon. A dog would do, I decided. Maybe on the way to Colorado Daddy would let me get a dog.

I ached for Mama, for the way she’d always kiss me good night. The pain was like what Daddy had told me his pain had been when he’d first lost his arm—and sometimes still was. An aching of the part of you that was not there anymore. How could that be, I’d wondered when he first told me. Now I knew.

“Do you want to talk about your mama?” Elinora’s voice came across the dark.

“No, I want to be left alone.”

“You can’t go on to Colorado with your daddy, you know.”

“And why not?”

“It isn’t right, a girl our age going to Colorado. There’s nothing there but miners and Indians and saloons and bawdy houses. No real homes or real people.”

“My daddy is real people.”

“He’s too addled to take care of you.”

“He’s not addled. Anyways, I don’t need taking care of.”

“You go there, you’ll be doing laundry in a tub of cold water. Eating in a saloon. There’s no churches, no proper families.”

I snuggled into my quilts. “What do you care?”

“No need to be Miss Sassy-Boots. I’m only trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help, thank you. Now I need to sleep so I can get up early and help put stones on Mama’s grave so when we leave the wolves don’t get into it.”

Elinora made a shuddering sound. “How you can talk so,” she said. “You’ve lost all sense of propriety. My mama’s been dead since I was ten, and you don’t see me being boorish, do you?”

“I hope, shortly, not to see you at all, Elinora.”

“I’m suffering this from you only because you just lost your mama. I’m offering it up.”

“You do that.”

“You’re blasphemous, too. The Sisters will be shocked when they meet you.”

“They won’t meet me if I can help it.”

“You do get over it, you know. Your mother dying. She’s in heaven with God. You should be happy for her.”

“I’d be happier if she was here, Elinora. God doesn’t need her, and I do.”

“Oh, sweet Mother of God.”

I knew she was crossing herself. She’d come from a convent school in St. Louis. She was all the time saying her beads and showing me pictures of saints with fire around their heads and their eyes cast to heaven. I knew them just from her telling: Saint Theresa. Saint Agnes. And some man saint all pierced with arrows, like he’d been attacked by Comanches.

Worse yet, her last name was St. Clair. Her mama was the Bishop’s niece, had gone to school in Santa Fe herself and taken it all so seriously she’d gone and married somebody with a saint’s name.

“Of course, your mama’s likely in a Methodist part of heaven, and that isn’t as good as the Catholic part. But I’m sure she’s very happy.”

“If you don’t hush up, Elinora, I’m going to take those beads of yours and wrap them around your neck!” I meant it. She didn’t hush, though. It’d take more than that to make her.

“Did you know that years ago my uncle met Kit Carson?”

I did not answer.

“Did you know there are two witches who live in Santa Fe who dispense love potions?”

I turned over on my quilts, hating her.

“I already know how to make a love potion. You mix herbs, powders, cornmeal, and worms. They can be fried or mashed, it doesn’t matter. Then you put some urine of the person you want to love you in it.”

“How do you get that?” I demanded.

“What?”

“The urine of the person you want to love you. How do you get it?”

“Well, if you’re going to split hairs, Lizzy Enders, when I go to visit the witches in Santa Fe, you can’t come with me.”

“I won’t be there, so you can live with them as far as I’m concerned.”

“Don’t be so sure that it won’t happen.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Did you know that my-uncle-the-Bishop once fought off an attack by Comanches? It was just after the war. On his way home to Santa Fe after a trip to Rome, he picked up some Jesuit priests and some nuns in Ohio. Their wagon train was attacked by Comanches along the Arkansas River. Some men traveling with him were killed, but he was right out front fighting, shooting his six-guns, for six hours. And they finally beat the Comanches back.”

Well, I thought, then maybe he’ll be a match for you.

I heard her turning over in my traveling bed. I never thought I could hate anybody so much in my whole life as I hated Elinora St. Clair that night. My whole body shook with sobs of hatred for her. At least that was what I told myself my body was shaking from. But I buried my face in the pillow so she wouldn’t hear me.